Abstract of "Meetings with costly participation" by Martin J. Osborne, Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, and Matthew A. Turner

We study a collective decision-making process in which people who are interested in an issue are invited to attend a meeting, and the policy chosen is a compromise among the preferences of those who show up. We show that in an equilibrium the number of attendees is small and their positions are extreme, and that when the compromise is the median, the outcome is likely to be random. The model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the outcome of hearings on US regulatory policy. (JEL D7, H0, L5)