AGENT HETEROGENEITY AND CONSENSUAL DECISION-MAKING ON THE FEDERAL OPEN MARKET COMMITTEE

The consensual aspects of decision making are essential for understand ing policy made by administrative organizations that take the form of a commision or board. Consensual decision making reflects the degree o f policy cohesion exhibited by high-level officials within administrat ive organizations. It is proposed here that this type of behavior may differ between heterogeneous agents. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve System serves as a salient setting for testing these propositions in a time series context. The empirical res ults indicate that major intra-institutional differences exist between Board of Governor (BOG) and Regional Bank President (REP) members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regarding consensual behavior . In terms of policy decision making, the econometric evidence clearly demonstrates that the consensual behavior of these agents are fundame ntally different from one another. This in turn has important implicat ions for the study of other commission and board policy making bodies that consist of agents who are not all homogeneous.