@article{4ed66f90efd0431c8009a37bec5f53fc,
title = "Can words get in the way? The effect of deliberation in collective decision making",
abstract = "We quantify the effect of deliberation on the decisions of US appellate courts. We estimate a model in which strategic judges communicate before casting their votes and then compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no communication. The model has multiple equilibria, and preferences and information parameters are only partially identified. We find that there is a range of parameters in the identified set—when judges tend to disagree ex ante or their private information is imprecise—in which deliberation can be beneficial; otherwise, deliberation reduces the effectiveness of the court.",
author = "Matias Iaryczower and Xiaoxia Shi and Matthew Shum",
note = "Funding Information: bia, Emory, Erasmus University{\textquoteright}s Workshop in Political Economy 2012, Higher School of Economics (Russia), New York University, Princeton, Seoul National, Singapore Management, Sogang, Stanford (Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics 2012), University College London, Chicago, Montr{\'e}al, Penn, Western Ontario, and Washington University for comments. Financial support from National Science Foundation grants SES-1061326 (Iaryczower) and SES-1061266 (Shum) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Alex Bolton, Benjamin Johnson, and Emerson Melo for excellent research assistance. Data are provided as supplementary material online. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1086/696228",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "126",
pages = "688--734",
journal = "Journal of Political Economy",
issn = "0022-3808",
publisher = "University of Chicago",
number = "2",
}