Human groups can perform extraordinary accurate estimations compared to individuals by simply using the mean, median or geometric mean of the individual estimations [Galton 1907, Surowiecki 2005, Page 2008]. However, this is true only for some tasks and in general these collective estimations show strong biases. The method fails also when allowing for social interactions, which makes the collec...

The introduction of participatory rating mechanisms on online sales platforms has had substantial impact on firms’ sales and profits. In this note, we develop a dynamic model of consumer influences on ratings and of rating influences on consumers, focussing on standard five-star mechanisms as implemented bymany platforms. The key components of our social influence model are the consumer trust i...

Even though considerable attention has been given to the polarity of words (positive and negative) and the creation of large polarity lexicons, research in emotion analysis has had to rely on limited and small emotion lexicons. In this paper we show how the combined strength and wisdom of the crowds can be used to generate a large, high-quality, word–emotion and word–polarity association lexico...

This Brief Communication discusses the benefits of citation analysis in research evaluation based on Galton's "Wisdom of Crowds" (1907). Citations are based on the assessment of many which is why they can be ascribed a certain amount of accuracy. However, we show that citations are incomplete assessments and that one cannot assume that a high number of citations correlate with a high level of u...

Computer games are currently one of the computer science applications with the highest amount of users. “Serious gaming” approaches try to use the attraction of playing games to convey serious content in an entertaining way. This paper presents a multi-agent-architecture for collaborative, serious and casual games. We are combining serious games with casual games, as these are known to have a h...

Improving public service delivery is a very complex domain and the complexity is difficult to grasp by stakeholders having various degree of knowledge and involvement. An emergent and promising method for dealing with complex problems is simulation gaming, which can be used to...

We evaluate the asymptotic performance of boundedly-rational strategies in multi-armed bandit problems, where performance is measured in terms of the tendency (in the limit) to play optimal actions in either (i) isolation or (ii) networks of other learners. We show that, for many strategies commonly employed in economics, psychology, and machine learning, performance in isolation and performanc...

Social media has become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. Could we use the so-called “wisdom of crowds” to detect the likelihood that some claim spreadi...

An important way to make large training sets is to gather noisy labels from crowds of nonexperts. We propose a minimax entropy principle to improve the quality of these labels. Our method assumes that labels are generated by a probability distribution over workers, items, and labels. By maximizing the entropy of this distribution, the method naturally infers item confusability and worker expert...

Several classical constructions illustrate the fact that the chromatic number of a graph may be arbitrarily large compared to its clique number. However, until very recently no such construction was known for intersection graphs of geometric objects in the plane. We provide a general construction that for any arc-connected compact set X in R that is not an axis-aligned rectangle and for any pos...