We study an endogenous opinion (or, belief) dynamics model where we endogenize the social network that models the link (‘trust’) weights between agents. Our network adjustment mechanism is simple: an agent increases her weight for another agent if that agent has been close to truth (whence, our adjustment criterion is ‘past performance’). Moreover, we consider multiply biased agents that do not...

We investigated the extent to which the human capacity for recognition helps to forecast political elections: We compared naïve recognition-based election forecasts computed from convenience samples of citizens’ recognition of party names to (i) standard polling forecasts computed from representative samples of citizens’ voting intentions, and to (ii) simple—and typically very accurate—wisdom-o...

Estimating and forecasting are difficult tasks. This is true whether the activity requires the determination of uncertain future event outcomes, or whether the estimation effort is complex in itself and based on insufficient information. Consequently, such tasks are frequently assigned to experts. Surprisingly, recent research suggests that collectives of non-experts can outperform individual e...

The Wisdom of Crowds is a phenomenon described in social science that suggests four criteria applicable to groups of people. It is claimed that, if these criteria are satisfied, then the aggregate decisions made by a group will often be better than those of its individual members. Inspired by this concept, we present a novel feedback framework for the cluster ensemble problem, which we call Wis...

Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a collaborative system with a low cost of online participation. However, it is an open question whether the success of Wikipedia results from a “wisdom of crowds” type of effect in which a large number of people each make a small number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of “elite” users who do the lion’s share of the work. In this...