QLS-TLQS Seminar - Wed. 7 May at 10h30 - "Biased Transmission Drives an Accuracy-Consensus Tradeoff in Collective Decision-making" by Erol AKCAY

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Dear All,

On Wednesday, 7 May at 10:30 CET, Prof. Erol Akcay (U. of Pennsylvania) 
will give a seminar titled:

*"Biased Transmission Drives an Accuracy-Consensus Tradeoff in 
Collective Decision-making"

*_Abstract:

_Collective decision-making can be more accurate than individual 
decision-making, due to the ability of groups to aggregate information 
from many individuals. However, information aggregation is vulnerable to 
a variety of social and cognitive biases which can undermine the "wisdom 
of the crowds" and result in bad decisions. Here, we study the effect of 
two very hard-to-avoid kinds of biases: the tendency of similar 
individuals to be connected, and the tendency to share some kinds of 
information more than others. We build mathematical models of a society 
composed of rational agents that use Bayesian inference to learn about 
the world, combining their direct observations with information they 
obtain from other agents. We include two forms of transmission bias: (1) 
assortment in communication networks, where individuals preferentially 
connect with similar others, and (2) selective sharing of signals. We 
identify conditions under which these effects are sufficient to generate 
stable divergence of beliefs across the population--either in the form 
of polarization or the entire population being misled. We show that when 
the population is balanced between types of agents, the collective is 
most sensitive to the effects of assortment. This is also the condition 
when the collective is  most responsive to the environment. Therefore, 
belief polarization is most likely under conditions that  support the 
greatest collective ability to sense the truth. Our results thus 
identify tradeoffs between accuracy and consensus in collective 
decision-making and highlight structural limits to collective 
intelligence, even in an idealized setting.


_Indico: https://indico.ictp.it/event/11027/_

The seminar will take place in the _Common area, Old SISSA building, 
second floor - Via Beirut, 2_*_
_
* You are all most welcome to attend!

Best regards,
Erica

Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail:qls at ictp.it