Interest in citizen science is growing among both scientists and community groups who are interested creating natural resource management projects. Such projects have the potential to result social learning, which can further reinforce stewardship. Data study this learning process, however, remain scant. Using transcripts from four different projects, we use discourse analysis investigate discu...

The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. We have chosen to tackle this problem. Our approach to addressing the problem of finding people who ...

Imagine that you have been appointed the director of a laboratory comprising several research teams. Each team consists of three scientists who examine data emanating from an unknown physical source. Different teams work on different problems of this nature. Each scientist elaborates a theory of the source underlying the data he receives, and he communicates the theory to you without consulting...

ion, while the remainder occur within a given level. FNIX avoids the issues associated with searching by relying on a

An expert is a person whose performance in a given domain is superior to that of the large majority of the population. Recursively, a super-expert is an expert whose performance is superior to that of the large majority of the expert population. The study of the development of expertise has been the province of psychology, but has also attracted interest in other fields such as biology, educati...

Political scientists have shown that one can anticipate how a judge will decide a case more often than chance, or a reading of the facts, might allow by using various predictors such as party affiliation, gender, or the judge’s own decisions on earlier similar cases. The simplest explanation for such behavior is that judges first decide what they want the outcome of the case to be, then go back...

We examine the effect of the presence of expert buyers on other buyers, the platform, and the sellers in online markets. We model buyer expertise as the ability to accurately predict the quality, or condition, of an item, modeled as its common value. We show that non-experts may bid more aggressively, even above their expected valuation, to compensate for their lack of information. As a consequ...

A central question of crowd-sourcing is how to elicit expertise from agents. This is even more difficult when answers cannot be directly verified. A key challenge is that sophisticated agents may strategically withhold effort or information when they believe their payoff will be based upon comparison with other agents whose reports will likely omit this information due to lack of effort or expe...