| Formatted abstract
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In order to formulate efficient committee voting mechanisms, it is imperative to establish the theoretical basis on which groups with a common objective aggregate the private information of their members. The extensive literature focussed on these so-called Condorcet games has utilised a jury setting in which each juror receives a single, private signal before undertaking a simultaneous vote to either convict or acquit a defendant. However, it seems plausible that the information acquisition process is much richer in reality, with each juror receiving his or her information set through a multidimensional process. This research extends the Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) uni-signal jury model to allow for each juror to receive two private signals relevant to the case. Firstly, the socially optimal verdict given a public revelation of privately held information is derived. Secondly, it is shown that this social optimum cannot, in general, be implemented by the symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria that result from any threshold voting rule. Thirdly, the role of deliberation in ameliorating this inefficiency is discussed. A class of deliberative mechanisms are introduced that both minimise the amount of information transmission required in deliberation and induce the social optimum. Finally, these informationally efficient deliberative mechanisms are shown to be robust to alternative formulations of multi-dimensionality in the information acquisition process.
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