Collective Action and Decision-making

Mass collaboration and the aggregation of information enable potentially profound changes in business and politics. In this class, we will compare and contrast the transformations in economic life and collective decision-making processes brought on the information revolution. The discussions will also explore the role of open information systems on business and the scope for greater transparency and participation in government, politics and public life.

Readings

• James Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds (excerpt)
  • NYT Review

• Ethan Zuckerman's blog review of Infotopia Great summary of the issues in the book.

Additional Thoughts

• Federalist Papers published under the pseudonym Publius.
• Divided They Blog - a paper showing trackbacks between political blogs, mentioned by Ethan Zuckerman in his review of Cass Sunstein's Infotopia

Class Discussion

Class Introduction by Amarquis 08:09, 21 February 2010 (UTC) Internet technologies allow for new kinds of information dissemination, collective action and decision making. Simply, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does online communication lead to increased isolation, polarization of discussion and impoverished decision-making or does it harness a "wisdom of crowds," create improved ways of collecting information and allows groups to act on and make decisions about what they learn more effectively?

There is an old Freudian notion that crowds are irrationally exuberant, but for many factual tasks such as guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, a group estimate is much more accurate than any individual estimate. However, in different circumstances, particularly those which require deliberation, different groups can come to very different decisions on the same issue. The research cited in the reading seems very poor in terms of measuring whether or groups converge or diverge and under what circumstances especially because they all have simple experimental problems including small sample sizes, a lack of even basic statistical analysis and they are not comparative. For example, if political blogs may not have many links to blogs with a different points of view (Though it's hard to know since Adamic and Glance don't compute the statistical significance of all but one of the differences they measure), do traditional news sources have a similar divergence? Given that markets do a better job of coordinating many kinds of activities what are the limits of prediction markets? It's clear that groupthink exists and that social forces bias decision-making, but is it possible to measure whether the Internet is making human decision making better? If so, what are some good experiments to run?

• Heather Hagni Class Introduction

Sigmund Freud’s theories explain that when groups of people get together, each person’s individual psyche is still there, only on a much larger scale, causing the power for rational thought to diminish. However, James Surowiecki explains in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” that collaborative thinking might yield better results than Freud had theorized. The Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? example: the phone-a-friend lifeline generated the correct answer 64% of the time, while the ask-the-audience lifeline chose the correct answer 91% of the time (not scientifically valid, however). The Jelly Bean example: when a group of people are asked to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar, then the average of their estimates is much more accurate than any individual’s.

The Internet can be used to collaborate for any intent. Collective ideas can be used productively. For example, problems that are seemingly impossible to solve can be solved through Internet collaboration. Information can be exchanged, new information can be discovered, and focus can be expanded. Markets can be more accurately analyzed by the collected actions of Internet consumers than by a few men. But what happens when an online community becomes opinionated? Information can influence groups of people; however, on the Internet, groups of people control the information they seek. Sunstein writes in Infotopia that too much information customization can actually narrow people’s focus instead of expanding it. This can polarize groups of people, not allowing for a functional democracy.

“Ignorance can lower our chances of making an accurate decision, but so can political bias and preconception.” Are there mechanisms by which society can promote collaborative internet exchange of knowledge and discovery yet limit the effects of polarization caused by the powerful communities of likeminded biases?

-Hnhagni 21:06, 23 February 2010 (UTC)