Related papers: Harvesting Collective Intelligence: Temporal Behav…
When foraging for information, users face a tradeoff between the accuracy and value of the acquired information and the time spent collecting it, a problem which also surfaces when seeking answers to a question posed to a large community.…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
Crowds can often make better decisions than individuals or small groups of experts by leveraging their ability to aggregate diverse information. Question answering sites, such as Stack Exchange, rely on the "wisdom of crowds" effect to…
Crowdsourcing can identify high-quality solutions to problems; however, individual decisions are constrained by cognitive biases. We investigate some of these biases in an experimental model of a question-answering system. In both natural…
Millions of people express themselves on public social media, such as Twitter. Through their posts, these people may reveal themselves as potentially valuable sources of information. For example, real-time information about an event might…
We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…
In the process of information gathering on the web, confirmation bias is known to exist, exemplified in phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles. Our purpose is to reveal how people consume news and discuss these phenomena. In web…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
Collective intelligence, which aggregates the shared information from large crowds, is often negatively impacted by unreliable information sources with the low quality data. This becomes a barrier to the effective use of collective…
We show how the quality of decisions based on the aggregated opinions of the crowd can be conveniently studied using a sample of individual responses to a standard IQ questionnaire. We aggregated the responses to the IQ questionnaire using…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
In many areas of data mining, data is collected from humans beings. In this contribution, we ask the question of how people actually respond to ordinal scales. The main problem observed is that users tend to be volatile in their choices,…
We analyze the following group learning problem in the context of opinion diffusion: Consider a network with $M$ users, each facing $N$ options. In a discrete time setting, at each time step, each user chooses $K$ out of the $N$ options,…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms…
Generating models from large data sets -- and determining which subsets of data to mine -- is becoming increasingly automated. However choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied…
Crowdsourcing works by distributing many small tasks to large numbers of workers, yet the true potential of crowdsourcing lies in workers doing more than performing simple tasks---they can apply their experience and creativity to provide…