Skill, power and marginal contribution in committees

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 may result in higher inequality of the two types of power and that the distribution of the second type of power (mc) can be even more 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.