科学研究

Xin Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of International Trade and Economics, the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toronto in 2016, and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney during 2016-2020 before joining UIBE. His main fields of research are Microeconomic Theory, Political Economy, and Behavioral/Experimental Economics. His work has been accepted for publication or published in the Canadian Journal of Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Review of International Economics, etc.  

We consider a model of collective persuasion, in which members of an advisory committee receive private continuous signals and vote on a policy change. A conservative decision maker, upon observing the committee members’ votes, decides whether to adopt the change. We show that the DM can be persuaded to adopt the change if and only if she can be persuaded under the unanimity rule. In general, when the DM becomes more conservative, she in equilibrium asks for a higher level of consensus among the committee members in favoring the change. Our results thus provide a rationale for the use of unanimity rule, despite its poor performance in information aggregation (Feddersen and Pesendorfer 1998). The results also imply that when considering whether the DM can be persuaded, it is without loss to focus on symmetric voting equilibria. We discuss why our continuous-signal model and the discrete-signal models (Battaglini 2017; Gradwohl and Feddersen 2018) in the literature produce contrasting results.