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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…
To make decisions organisms often accumulate information across multiple timescales. However, most experimental and modeling studies of decision-making focus on sequences of independent trials. On the other hand, natural environments are…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
This paper studies prototypical strategies to sequentially aggregate independent decisions. We consider a collection of agents, each performing binary hypothesis testing and each obtaining a decision over time. We assume the agents are…
How does temporally structured private and social information shape collective decisions? To address this question we consider a network of rational agents who independently accumulate private evidence that triggers a decision upon reaching…
Does talking to others make people more accurate or less accurate on numeric estimates such as quantitative evaluations or probabilistic forecasts? Research on peer-to-peer communication suggests that discussion between people will usually…
Decision-making individuals are typically either an imitator, who mimics the action of the most successful individual(s), a conformist (or coordinating individual), who chooses an action if enough others have done so, or a nonconformist (or…
Observation of other people's choices can provide useful information in many circumstances. However, individuals may not utilize this information efficiently, i.e., they may make decision-making errors in social interactions. In this paper,…
Conformal prediction is a statistically rigorous method for quantifying uncertainty in models by having them output sets of predictions, with larger sets indicating more uncertainty. However, prediction sets are not inherently actionable;…
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…
We use a controlled experiment to study how information acquisition impacts candidate evaluations. We provide evaluators with group-level information on performance and the opportunity to acquire additional, individual-level performance…
Most decisions require information gathering from a stimulus presented with different gaps. Indeed, the brain process of this integration is rarely ambiguous. Recently, it has been claimed that humans can optimally integrate the information…
Theoretical results underpinning the Wisdom of Crowds, such as the Condorcet Jury Theorem, point to substantial accuracy gains through aggregation of decisions or opinions, but the foundations of this theorem are routinely undermined in…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…
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…
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
Usually, opinion formation models assume that individuals have an opinion about a given topic which can change due to interactions with others. However, individuals can have different opinions in different topics and therefore n-dimensional…