Related papers: Social influence makes self-interested crowds smar…
A long-standing debate is whether social influence improves the collective wisdom of a crowd or undermines it. This paper addresses this question based on a naive learning setting in influence systems theory: in our models individuals…
Whether, and under what conditions, groups exhibit "crowd wisdom" has been a major focus of research across the social and computational sciences. Much of this work has focused on the role of social influence in promoting the wisdom of the…
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
Wisdom of crowds refers to the phenomenon that the aggregate prediction or forecast of a group of individuals can be surprisingly more accurate than most individuals in the group, and sometimes - than any of the individuals comprising it.…
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…
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…
Human groups can perform extraordinary accurate estimations compared to individuals by simply using the mean, median or geometric mean of the individual estimations [Galton 1907, Surowiecki 2005, Page 2008]. However, this is true only for…
Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a…
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…
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…
Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research…
Wisdom of the crowd, the collective intelligence derived from responses of multiple human or machine individuals to the same questions, can be more accurate than each individual, and improve social decision-making and prediction accuracy.…
The provision of information can improve individual judgments but also fail to make group decisions more accurate; if individuals choose to attend to the same information in the same manner, the predictive diversity that enables crowd…
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…
A continuous-time Markov process is proposed to analyze how a group of humans solves a complex task, consisting in the search of the optimal set of decisions on a fitness landscape. Individuals change their opinions driven by two different…
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…
Online discussion threads are important means for individual decision-making and for aggregating collective judgments, e.g. the `wisdom of crowds'. Empirical investigations of the wisdom of crowds are currently ambivalent about the role…
Numerous studies and anecdotes demonstrate the "wisdom of the crowd," the surprising accuracy of a group's aggregated judgments. Less is known, however, about the generality of crowd wisdom. For example, are crowds wise even if their…
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…
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…