Meetings with costly participation: a comment.

Abstract

In a recent paper Osborne, Rosenthal and Turner (2000) investigate a model of meetings with costly participation. Their main result is that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme. In particular, when the policy space is one-dimensional and the policy outcome is the median of participants' positions, they conclude that the number of attendees is even. The proof is flawed. We construct an example with an odd number of attendees. Oddness of the number of participants has a dramatic consequence on how equilibria look like.