[SEJ] Joshua Becker: Does communication improve the wisdom of crowds?  It depends on the question.

25 April 2023 14:00 till 15:00 | Add to my calendar

esearch on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has consistently shown that one way to improve the accuracy of numeric estimates such as economic forecasting is by using the average estimate of multiple individual contributors, rather than relying on one single person. However, decades of lab experiments have produced contradictory results about whether and when communication between group members makes the resulting average more accurate or less accurate. Thus despite the existence of over 100k results on Google scholar using the “Delphi method” form of information exchange, we lack clear evidence that this method is actually better than unstructured discussion, or that any form of communication is better than none. This talk will explain contradictions in prior research by showing how emergent network centralization interacts with pre-communication estimate distribution such that communication sometimes increases accuracy and sometimes decreases accuracy. Using a formal model of estimate formation and experimental data, I will argue that the fixed effect paradigm—i.e. the assumption that any form of communication is always either helpful or harmful—must be replaced with a model that depends on the particular estimation task under consideration. I will conclude by discussing some limitations of this model for describing true deliberation, sharing some new research under development, and opening the floor for collaborative speculation and brainstorming on how future research might address these topics.