Related papers: What do leaders know?
The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgment. This centenarian finding, popularly known as the wisdom of crowds, has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the structure of…
We consider a population of mobile agents able to make noisy observation of the environment and communicate their observation by production and comprehension of signals. Individuals try to align their movement direction with their…
We consider a group of Bayesian agents who try to estimate a state of the world $\theta$ through interaction on a social network. Each agent $v$ initially receives a private measurement of $\theta$: a number $S_v$ picked from a Gaussian…
We propose a model of inference and heuristic decision-making in groups that is rooted in the Bayes rule but avoids the complexities of rational inference in partially observed environments with incomplete information, which are…
Many of today's most pressing issues require a more robust understanding of how information spreads in populations. Current models of information spread can be thought of as falling into one of two varieties: epidemiologically-inspired…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
Complex decision-making systems rarely have direct access to the current state of the world and they instead rely on opinions to form an understanding of what the ground truth could be. Even in problems where experts provide opinions…
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 consider the problem of identifying the most influential nodes for a spreading process on a network when prior knowledge about structure and dynamics of the system is incomplete or erroneous. Specifically, we perform a numerical analysis…
We consider the problem of information aggregation in federated decision making, where a group of agents collaborate to infer the underlying state of nature without sharing their private data with the central processor or each other. We…
An agent makes decisions based on multiple sources of information. In isolation, each source is well understood, but their correlation is unknown. We study the agent's robustly optimal strategies -- those that give the best possible…
The wisdom of crowds has been shown to operate not only for factual judgments but also in matters of taste, where accuracy is defined relative to an individual's preferences. However, it remains unclear how different types of social signals…
Distributed computing models typically assume reliable communication between processors. While such assumptions often hold for engineered networks, e.g., due to underlying error correction protocols, their relevance to biological systems,…
Following the Bayesian communication learning paradigm, we propose a finite population learning concept to capture the level of information aggregation in any given network, where agents are allowed to communicate with neighbors repeatedly…
A community of agents is subject to a stream of messages, which are represented as points on a plane of issues. Messages are sent by media and by agents themselves. Messages from media shape the public opinion. They are unbiased, i.e.…
An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…
We study the problem of eliciting and aggregating probabilistic information from multiple agents. In order to successfully aggregate the predictions of agents, the principal needs to elicit some notion of confidence from agents, capturing…