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Distilling the wisdom of crowds: weighted aggregation of decisions on multiple issues

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Abstract

Given the judgments of multiple voters regarding some issue, it is generally assumed that the best way to arrive at some collective judgment is by following the majority. We consider here the now common case in which each voter expresses some (binary) judgment regarding each of a multiplicity of independent issues and assume that each voter has some fixed (unknown) probability of making a correct judgment for any given issue. We leverage the fact that multiple votes by each voter are known in order to demonstrate, both analytically and empirically, that a method based on maximum likelihood estimation is superior to the simple majority rule for arriving at true collective judgments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Haifa, 31905, Haifa, Israel

    Eyal Baharad

  2. School of Engineering, Bar Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Jacob Goldberger

  3. Department of Computer Sciences, Bar Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Moshe Koppel

  4. Department of Economics, Bar Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Shmuel Nitzan

Authors
  1. Eyal Baharad
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  2. Jacob Goldberger
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  3. Moshe Koppel
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  4. Shmuel Nitzan
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Correspondence to Moshe Koppel.

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Baharad, E., Goldberger, J., Koppel, M. et al. Distilling the wisdom of crowds: weighted aggregation of decisions on multiple issues. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 22, 31–42 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9120-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9120-y

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