Why It Is Healthy to Regularly Challenge Authority: An Algorithmic Explanation

One way to make group decisions is to select the best decision maker(s) in the group as the authority, and to follow his or her decisions. At first glance, it seems that if the selected authority is indeed the best decision maker, it is beneficial for everyone to obey his or her authority. However, history shows that in many cases, challenges to the authority (even to the authority of the best decision maker) were beneficial to the group. In this paper, we provide an algorithmic explanation for this phenomenon. The main idea behind this explanation is that most practical general problems are NP-hard and thus, no feasible algorithm can solve all instances of such a problem. Thus, even for the best decision maker, who uses the best of the currently available feasible algorithms, there inevitably are cases when the resulting decision is not the best, and can thus be improved. 1 Formulation of the Problem: In Spite of Seemingly Reasonable Arguments to the Contrary, Evidence Shows That It Is Often Healthy to Challenge Authority Need to make group decisions. In real life, we all need to make decisions. A decision made by one person often affects others, so it is necessary to coordinate our decision making, i.e., in other words, to make joint (group-wise) decisions. So, a group of people needs to make decisions – and act according to the selected decisions. In general, everyone has his or her own interests, but suppose that the people in a group agreed – formally or informally – how to combine these interests into a single objective function. For example, they can use Nash’s bargaining solution and try to maximize the product of their utilities; see, e.g., [1].