The effect of democratic decision-making on investment in reputation

Abstract

Students wish to increase the probability of being admitted to a prestigious school. Job candidates are interested in the probability of getting desirable employment. Defendants are concerned about the probability of being acquitted. In all such binary settings, the probability of the desirable outcome to individuals can be affected by their reputations. Applying the classical Condorcet Jury Theorem framework in which decision makers are assumed to be non-strategic, we focus on how the nature of the applied decision-making rule affects the individuals’ incentives to invest in improvement of their reputations. Our main results establish that, within the family of democratic majority voting rules, simple majority rule (a rule of unanimous consent) ensures that the marginal productivity of reputation is largest (smallest) and that it increases (decreases) with the size of the decision-making committee.