A nonspeculation theorem with an application to committee design

Abstract

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. Various well known agreement theorems show that if players have common knowledge of actions and a "veto" action is available to every player, then they cannot agree to forgo a Pareto optimal outcome simply because of private information in settings with unique equilibrium. We establish a nonspeculation theorem which is more general than previous results and is applicable to political and economic situations that generate multiple equilibria. We demonstrate an application of our result to the problem of designing an independent committee free of private persuasion.