Plausibility of signals by a heterogeneous committee

Krishna and Morgan propose "amendments" to two of Gilligan and Krehbiel's t heoretical studies of legislative signaling. The new results far homogeneou s committees do not significantly change the empirical expectations of prio r works, but the results for heterogeneous committees contradict earlier cl aims. This note gives primary attention to heterogeneous committees and com pares and contrasts the new and old equilibria and their empirical implicat ions. The notion of signaling is somewhat nebulous in all such games but se ems distinctly less plausible in the key Krishna-Morgan proposition than in previous legislative signaling games. Furthermore, the empirical literatur e on choice of rules-specifically, the finding of a positive relationship b etween committee heterogeneity and restrictive rules-is inconsistent,with t he Krishna-Morgan analysis but consistent with Gilligan-Krehbiel analyses, even though the former is informationally efficient and the latter are not.