Time:14:00-16:00, April 9, 2026

Venue: Room 425, Building 2H, Science Park

Lecture Topic: Voting over Time and Space

Speaker Profile

John Quah (Jinhao KE) currently serves as Head of the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. He previously served as a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and Johns Hopkins University in the United States. His primary research interests include decision theory, general equilibrium theory, and revealed preferences. He has published over 10 papers in the top five international economics journals, and his academic achievements have been widely recognized by the academic community.

Lecture Abstract

A committee chooses a profile of actions via a sequence of binary votes. Actions are complements, and committee members can be ranked according to their preference for high action profiles. We show that, for a rich family of voting procedures, the committee chooses the action profile favoured by an agent who enjoys a central position in the ranking. Moreover, the chosen profile remains the same if agents are privately informed about their preferences. We obtain analogous results for committees facing dynamic stochastic decision problems. We derive applications to problems of multi-input investment, resource allocation, information gathering, optimal bankruptcy, and production with adjustment costs.