Record Details


Field	Value

Title	Replication Data for: Committee Decision-Making under the Threat of Leaks

Identifier	https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AV3OQM

Creator	Fehrler, Sebastian Hahn, Volker

Publisher	Harvard Dataverse

Description	Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the decision-making accuracy. Our theoretical analysis generates two major predictions. First, a committee operating under the threat of leaks is equivalent to a formally transparent committee in terms of the probabilities of supporting the adoption of a new policy. Second, the threat of leaks leads to a status-quo bias. In our experimental analysis of a committee with possible leaks, individual behavior is often less strategic than theoretically predicted, which leads to frequent leaks. However, despite these deviations on the individual level, our experiment confirms the two major theoretical predictions.

Subject	Social Sciences committee decision-making strategic communication voting leaks transparency monetary policy committees information aggregation

Contributor	Fehrler, Sebastian

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