Related papers: Wisdom of crowds: much ado about nothing
Rationality is frequently associated with making the best possible decisions. It's widely acknowledged that humans, as rational beings, have limitations in their decision-making capabilities. Nevertheless, recent advancements in fields,…
Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…
This paper presents a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. It reports on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users' aggregate voting behavior.…
Theoretical models of populations and swarms typically start with the assumption that the motion of agents is governed by the local stimuli. However, an intelligent agent, with some understanding of the laws that govern its habitat, can…
The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve…
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 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…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
The realism and believability of crowd simulations underpins computational studies of human collective behaviour, with implications for urban design, policing, security and many other areas. Realism concerns the closeness of the fit between…
Following Fisher, it is widely believed that randomization "relieves the experimenter from the anxiety of considering innumerable causes by which the data may be disturbed." In particular, it is said to control for known and unknown…
Crowd-sourcing deals with solving problems by assigning them to a large number of non-experts called crowd using their spare time. In these systems, the final answer to the question is determined by summing up the votes obtained from the…
We proposed a probabilistic approach to joint modeling of participants' reliability and humans' regularity in crowdsourced affective studies. Reliability measures how likely a subject will respond to a question seriously; and regularity…
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…
Truthfulness judgments are a fundamental step in the process of fighting misinformation, as they are crucial to train and evaluate classifiers that automatically distinguish true and false statements. Usually such judgments are made by…
We study the properties of macroeconomic survey forecast response averages as the number of survey respondents grows. Such averages are ``portfolios" of forecasts. We characterize the speed and pattern of the gains from diversification as a…
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…
Crowdsourcing systems aggregate decisions of many people to help users quickly identify high-quality options, such as the best answers to questions or interesting news stories. A long-standing issue in crowdsourcing is how option quality…
It is often reported in forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the "forecast combination puzzle". Motivated…
This paper argues for recognizing an emerging paradigm of causal learning by wisdom of the crowd. Recent developments in government, industry, and research point to the rise of decentralized and crowd-based approaches within causal…
Schema matching is a central challenge for data integration systems. Inspired by the popularity and the success of crowdsourcing platforms, we explore the use of crowdsourcing to reduce the uncertainty of schema matching. Since…