Publicity of debate in committee decision-making: The influence of the state of the world

This thesis analyses the behaviour of agents in committee decision-making when faced with a probability distribution of the state of the world where each state is not as likely to occur as the other one. This thesis shows that when the prior probability of an outcome of the state of the world is sufficiently high, agents will have an incentive to speak truthfully when deliberation is done privately, but may vote on a policy action to take that is not in line with the outcome of the message round. When individual messages and votes are made public, the existence of an informative equilibrium is only possible if the probability of the state of the world does not deviate too much from a 50-50 per cent level, because a high prior probability of one of the two states results in players voting in line with this prior, rather than conveying their received signals truthfully