But don’t we also have lots of evidence of the poor performance under a regime of decision by committee?
I might also be tempted to say one needs to consider all the social/public choice literature that suggests masses really are pretty bad at getting much right—in other words, groups of people cannot generally come to a rational choice. (And, yes I get that can seem at odds with things like prediction markets but I think the key there is the institutional setting of all the separate individual choices).
Perhaps also relevant is an old paper one of my professors once mentions (all those years ago ;-) called something like The Chairman’s Problem. I never read it but as I recall from the context it was really about how to overcome the host of problems everyone knows about (cycles, agenda settings, effect of iterative pairwise selection of multiple alternatives...). Essentially it seems the way the problem was cast, the Chairman ultimately had to be that unilateralist. Now, that doesn’t completely go against the argument as I understand it being made—the chairman clearly is listening to the committee members. But the point was, the chairman could not really rely on the committee to actually give a good solution (or take action).
But don’t we also have lots of evidence of the poor performance under a regime of decision by committee?
I might also be tempted to say one needs to consider all the social/public choice literature that suggests masses really are pretty bad at getting much right—in other words, groups of people cannot generally come to a rational choice. (And, yes I get that can seem at odds with things like prediction markets but I think the key there is the institutional setting of all the separate individual choices).
Perhaps also relevant is an old paper one of my professors once mentions (all those years ago ;-) called something like The Chairman’s Problem. I never read it but as I recall from the context it was really about how to overcome the host of problems everyone knows about (cycles, agenda settings, effect of iterative pairwise selection of multiple alternatives...). Essentially it seems the way the problem was cast, the Chairman ultimately had to be that unilateralist. Now, that doesn’t completely go against the argument as I understand it being made—the chairman clearly is listening to the committee members. But the point was, the chairman could not really rely on the committee to actually give a good solution (or take action).