Parimal Kanti Bag, National University of Singapore
Centre for Development Economics
and
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
Secret Deliberations
by
Parimal Kanti Bag
National University of Singapore
On
22nd July, 2016 (Friday) at 3:00 PM
Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
All are cordially invited
Abstract
In a scenario where two career concerned experts sequentially recommend actions, the paper studies whether the Decision Maker (D) should make the deliberations transparent or keep it secret. The paper's main contributions are the following: (i) under secrecy, it identifies a novel effect that sometimes enables the second expert to credibly communicate her information and its high precision level (type) to D and swing the decision away from the first expert's advice; (ii) when type revelation happens the well-known `conformity bias' effect of group decisions gets nullified; (iii) secrecy leads to more honest recommendations; (iv) if the experts are on average of high quality, the only way a second expert can be effective is by conducting secret deliberations. Overall, secrecy (weakly) dominates transparency in terms of better decisions.