Delegation or Voting

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide to acquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decision problem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its quality has been acquired or not, we compare the performance of a delegation structure with that of two voting procedures. Delegation makes one's acceptance decision pivotal by definition. The decisiveness of one's vote in a voting procedure depends on the other agent's vote. This in turn determines the decision to acquire information. In the debate about a rational choice foundation of Condorcet's Jury Theorem, the distribution of information was left exogenous. Mixed (acceptance) strategies were required to validate th