Skill, power and marginal contribution in committees
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629820984849 |
| Author | Tomoya Tajika,Shmuel Nitzan,Ruth Ben-Yashar |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2021, Vol.33(2) 225–235
ÓThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984849
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Skill, power and marginal
contribution in committees
Ruth Ben-Yashar
Department of Economics, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Shmuel Nitzan
Department of Economics, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Tomoya Tajika
Department of Law and Economics, HokuseiGakuen University, Japan
Abstract
Power is an important basic concept in Political Science and Economics. Applying an extended
version of the uncertain dichotomous choice model proposed, the objective of this paper is to
clarify the relationship between two different types of power a voter may have: skill-dependent
(s-d) power and marginal contribution (mc). It is then shown that, under the optimal committee
decision rule, inequality in skills mayresult in higher inequality of the two types of power and that
the distribution of the second type of power (mc) can be evenmore unequal than the distribution
of the first type of s-d power. Using simulations, and assuming evenly spread skills, this possibility
is proved to be robust. The significance of the finding is due to the effect of power on reward,
whether it is defined in terms of status or in terms of monetary payment.
Keywords
Decisional skills; inequality; marginal contribution; skill-dependent power
1. Introduction
Political power has attracted much attention in Political Science. In this study, we
present and disentangle two different types of a voter’s power. Considerable effort
Corresponding author:
Shmuel Nitzan, Department ofEconomics, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900,Israel.
Email: nitzans@biu.ac.il
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