Endogenous agendas in committees (Q4352352)

When a committee faces the task of making a collective decision on several issues procedural matters seem to play an enormous role. The process of decision making typically involves a preliminary phase of negotiation, which may take the form of either an informal behind-the-scene bargaining or a round-table discussion prior to voting. We will formulate the process of such decision making as a non-cooperative bargaining game, and analyze the effect of the agenda on the efficiency and stability of the bargaining outcomes. In a previous, unpublished paper of the author it was shown that if the underlying preferences of the committee members are such that there exists a consensus over the importance of issues, then, in order to guarantee efficiency, issues should be negotiated in the order of their importance. Our main purpose here is to explore two models, in addition to those in the papers mentioned above, in which no agenda is exogenously determined prior to the bargaining. In one model the agenda itself is negotiated by the committee members before dealing with issues of substance; in the other, the agenda is determined endogenously, i.e., each proposer can at any time propose an alternative on any unsettled issue. We will show that these models can only partially replace the ``important issues first'' rule for maintaining efficiency and stability. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0866.00071].