Related papers: What do leaders know?
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,…
We explore a model of non-Bayesian information aggregation in networks. Agents non-cooperatively choose among Friedkin-Johnsen type aggregation rules to maximize payoffs. The DeGroot rule is chosen in equilibrium if and only if there is…
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…
Integrating information gained by observing others via Social Bayesian Learning can be beneficial for an agent's performance, but can also enable population wide information cascades that perpetuate false beliefs through the agent…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
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…
Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…
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.…
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…
Agents learn about a changing state using private signals and their neighbors' past estimates of the state. We present a model in which Bayesian agents in equilibrium use neighbors' estimates simply by taking weighted sums with…
We introduce a model for information spreading among a population of N agents diffusing on a square LxL lattice, starting from an informed agent (Source). Information passing from informed to unaware agents occurs whenever the relative…
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…
In our digital and connected societies, the development of social networks, online shopping, and reputation systems raises the question of how individuals use social information, and how it affects their decisions. We report experiments…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private…
We present a novel methodology for identifying public knowledge and eliminating the biases it creates when aggregating information in small group settings. A two stage mechanism consisting of an information market and a coordination game is…