Related papers: When social influence promotes the wisdom of crowd…
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.…
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…
"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…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
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…
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…
People's collectively shared beliefs can have significant social implications, including on democratic processes and policies. Unfortunately, as people interact with peers to form and update their beliefs, various cognitive and social…
A major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions.…
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…
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…
Cognitive biases are often attributed to heuristics or limited information. Yet the structure of social networks is a key, often-overlooked source of perceptual bias. When information passes through social connections, the network alone can…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Recommendation systems have received considerable attention recently. However, most research has been focused on improving the performance of collaborative filtering (CF) techniques. Social networks, indispensably, provide us extra…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
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…
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…
In this study, we build on previous research to understand the conditions within which the Wisdom of the Crowd (WoC) improves or worsens as a result of showing individuals the predictions of their peers. Our main novel contributions are: 1)…
What drives the propensity for the social network dynamics? Social influence is believed to drive both off-line and on-line human behavior, however it has not been considered as a driver of social network evolution. Our analysis suggest…
Social networks continuously change as new ties are created and existing ones fade. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts a strong influence on what information we receive and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However,…