An article co-written by Vincent Anesi, Professor within in the Department of Economics and Management at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance has recently been accepted for publication in the SJR-ranked Q1 journal, the “International Economic Review”.
In the article, titled “Deciding When to Decide: Collective Deliberation and Obstruction”, Prof. Anesi and co-author Mikhail Safronov (University of Cambridge) study the impact of deliberation rules on collective learning and decision making in committees. In contrast to much of the existing literature, the authors make a distinction between the final votes over policy proposals and the cloture votes that bring them about.
Using a microeconomic model, the authors show how deliberation rules can cause inefficient obstructive behaviour and failures to bring good proposals to a final vote. Furthermore, they demonstrate how these rules affect the distribution of power among committee members in the deliberative process. They further show that deliberation rules are dynamically persistent (in that no decisive coalition is able or willing to overturn them), even when they generate policy outcomes that are inefficient for all committee members.
A full version of the paper can be accessed at this link.