Summer Institute 2018 - The Wisdom of Small Crowds – Shenghua Luan

Описание: THE WISDOM OF SMALL CROWDS
From the U.S. Supreme Court to the executive boards of Fortune 500 companies, small committees are tasked with making many high-stakes decisions. Yet how accurate they are relative to much larger crowds has rarely been examined. An analysis of simulated crowds shows that when crowds make not one but multiple decisions, as real-world committees generally do, crowd accuracy improves much less than commonly expected as crowd size increases; as a result, the accuracy difference between small crowds of around 9 people and much larger crowds of more than 50 is often remarkably small. We tested the ecological validity of this finding in two large-scale real-world tasks: forecasting winners of National Football League games and judging which of two cities is more populous. In both tasks, small crowds were often equally or more accurate than the whole crowd from which their members were chosen. Thus, small crowds can possess great wisdom, justifying the common practice of delegating important decisions to small committees.

SHENGHUA LUAN
Shenghua is a cognitive psychologist who has a wide range of interests in judgment and decision-making research, including heuristics in judgment and decision-making, group decision processes and wisdom of the crowds, organizational and managerial decision-making, human cooperative behavior, and sports forecasting.

SUMMER INSTITUTE
The 2018 Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality took place on June 19 – 27, 2018, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.