Committees are often tasked with key decision making, yet a committee is not a singular unit but a group of individuals. This column provides a framework to assess the effect of making public individual votes in committees where members differ in competence and bias, and are concerned about external perceptions of their competence. While public voting attenuates the potential biases of competent members, secret voting attenuates the potential biases of incompetent members. Hence, transparency leads to better decisions when members are highly influenced by ideological or self-interested motives, and secret voting performs better otherwise.
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