| The two essays of this dissertation study collective decision-making processes in contexts of imperfect information. The first essay is an empirical study of the role of the US Congress in the design of the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I focus specifically on the allocation of NIH funds for biomedical research across diseases. I find that the NIH budget for clinical research is biased towards diseases that are more critical to the constituents with a representative belonging to the Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services of the House of Representatives. The allocation of basic research funds is not affected by subcommittee composition. In addition, there is no effect of the composition of the Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services of the Senate. The second essay is a theoretical analysis of the selection of issues to be debated upon by a committee. It considers a two-round voting procedure. Before a proposal becomes part of a political agenda and can be voted upon, it has to be selected by voters who are still uncertain about their preferences. The main find of the research is that the more stringent the selection rule, the less voters are inclined to select an issue. The driving force is that, conditioning on a given agent being pivotal to selecting an issue, it is more likely that other voters are in favor of reversing the status quo as the selection quorum increases. We extend these results to inform other procedures such as petitions or committee-selected agendas. |
