Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms
James
Madison wrote, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every
Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." The contributors to this
volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by
considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one.
With backgrounds in economics, cognitive science, political science,
law, and history, the authors consider information markets, the
Internet, jury debates, democratic deliberation, and the use of
diversity as mechanisms for improving collective decisions. At the same
time, they consider voter irrationality and paradoxes of aggregation as
possibly undermining the wisdom of groups. Implicitly or explicitly, the
volume also offers guidance and warnings to institutional designers.
