Optimal two stage committee voting rules

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not of information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or tenure stage return the committee to a candidate pool. For committees with N members, we find three key results: (1) a candidate's fate depends only on the behaviour of two `weather-vane' committee members - generalised median voters; (2) enthusiastic assessments by one of these weather-vanes may harm a candidate's chances by increasing others' thresholds for hiring him; and (3) sunk time costs may lead voters who opposed hiring a candidate to favour tenuring him, even after a poor probationary performance. We also characterise the optimal voting rule when N=2. A patient or perceptive committee does best with a (weak) majority at the hiring stage and unanimity at the tenure stage. An impatient or imperceptive committee does best under a double (weak) majority rule. If particularly impatient or imperceptive, this rule implies that any hire is automatically tenured. Perversely, the performance of a patient, imperceptive committee improves as its perceptiveness further declines.intertemporal strategic voting, real options, social choice, heterogenous priors, tenure

To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping Essay

It has become increasingly common to test whether sellers in retail markets discriminate against buyers. But this Essay is one of the first efforts to test the other side of the market. It examines whether retail consumers discriminate against sellers on the basis of the sellers\u27 race. Even though Gary Becker long ago understood that consumers\u27 taste[] for discrimination could cause sellers to discriminate against other customers—for example, leading restaurant owners to maintain racially segregated lunch counters—almost no one has tested whether consumers\u27 taste for discrimination might be directed at a seller\u27s race itself (or the race of a seller\u27s employees). This failure to test is unjustified. Tests of consumer-side race discrimination are just as feasible as seller-side testing. Consumer price discrimination might be observed in car and house negotiations and auction markets (including online markets such as eBay). Of course, the ability of consumers to discriminate in terms of pricing is often severely constrained. Outside of auction and negotiated-pricing regimes, consumers are generally presented with a fixed price

A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension

In this paper we resituate discussions of community-based science beyond the emancipatory rhetoric of democratization, creative commons, and the blurring of the bulwarks of expertise to include consideration of the potentially constrictive instrumentalist scientific idiom produced by and through these practices. Collectively, we apply four interrelated insights already available within STS literature to the chemical ecologies that we are immersed within and perpetuate: 1) projects engaged in the use of science for justice claims cannot fully escape reproducing hierarchies of knowledge-power, type, and knower; 2) the pursuit of science in these instances has the potential to foreclose imaginative horizons of “how” and “why” in favor of “how much”; 3) the pursuit of more data sets the stage for adversarial epistemological encounters that can lead to entrenchment rather than resolution; and 4) these practices have the resultant effect of defining and confining (democratic) participation to one in which data become an essential gateway to having a voice. Following from this, we ask: what are the approaches to apprehending the environment that might not so easily boil down to binaries of benevolence or harm, or to renderings of uncertainty confined to the specifications of statistical confidence intervals, that in turn justify further scientific inquiry? We gesture towards an expansive conversation that we call “inviting apprehension.” Such approaches beckon multiple strata of apprehending the environment to provoke public inquiry and intervention into the questions that undergird what we assume are the problems of today and the avenues through which we must engage them

A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension

In this paper we resituate discussions of community-based science beyond the emancipatory rhetoric of democratization, creative commons, and the blurring of the bulwarks of expertise to include consideration of the potentially constrictive instrumentalist scientific idiom produced by and through these practices. Collectively, we apply four interrelated insights already available within STS literature to the chemical ecologies that we are immersed within and perpetuate: 1) projects engaged in the use of science for justice claims cannot fully escape reproducing hierarchies of knowledge-power, type, and knower; 2) the pursuit of science in these instances has the potential to foreclose imaginative horizons of “how” and “why” in favor of “how much”; 3) the pursuit of more data sets the stage for adversarial epistemological encounters that can lead to entrenchment rather than resolution; and 4) these practices have the resultant effect of defining and confining (democratic) participation to one in which data become an essential gateway to having a voice. Following from this, we ask: what are the approaches to apprehending the environment that might not so easily boil down to binaries of benevolence or harm, or to renderings of uncertainty confined to the specifications of statistical confidence intervals, that in turn justify further scientific inquiry? We gesture towards an expansive conversation that we call “inviting apprehension.” Such approaches beckon multiple strata of apprehending the environment to provoke public inquiry and intervention into the questions that undergird what we assume are the problems of today and the avenues through which we must engage them

A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension

In this paper we resituate discussions of community-based science beyond the emancipatory rhetoric of democratization, creative commons, and the blurring of the bulwarks of expertise to include consideration of the potentially constrictive instrumentalist scientific idiom produced by and through these practices. Collectively, we apply four interrelated insights already available within STS literature to the chemical ecologies that we are immersed within and perpetuate: 1) projects engaged in the use of science for justice claims cannot fully escape reproducing hierarchies of knowledge-power, type, and knower; 2) the pursuit of science in these instances has the potential to foreclose imaginative horizons of “how” and “why” in favor of “how much”; 3) the pursuit of more data sets the stage for adversarial epistemological encounters that can lead to entrenchment rather than resolution; and 4) these practices have the resultant effect of defining and confining (democratic) participation to one in which data become an essential gateway to having a voice. Following from this, we ask: what are the approaches to apprehending the environment that might not so easily boil down to binaries of benevolence or harm, or to renderings of uncertainty confined to the specifications of statistical confidence intervals, that in turn justify further scientific inquiry? We gesture towards an expansive conversation that we call “inviting apprehension.” Such approaches beckon multiple strata of apprehending the environment to provoke public inquiry and intervention into the questions that undergird what we assume are the problems of today and the avenues through which we must engage them.&nbsp