Marshall, J. orcid.org/0000-0002-1506-167X, Kurvers, R.H.J.M., Krause, J. et al. (1 more author) (Submitted: 2018) Quorums enable optimal pooling of independent judgements. bioRxiv. (Submitted)
Abstract
Majority-voting and the Condorcet Jury Theorem pervade thinking about collective decision-making. Thus, it is typically assumed that majority-voting is the best possible decision mechanism, and that scenarios exist where individually-weak decision-makers should not pool information. Condorcet and its applications implicitly assume that only one kind of error can be made, yet signal detection theory shows two kinds of errors exist, ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’. We apply signal detection theory to collective decision-making to show that majority voting is frequently sub-optimal, and can be optimally replaced by quorum decision-making. While quorums have been proposed to resolve within-group conflicts, or manage speed-accuracy trade-offs, our analysis applies to groups with aligned interests undertaking single-shot decisions. Our results help explain the ubiquity of quorum decision-making in nature, relate the use of sub- and super-majority quorums to decision ecology, and may inform the design of artificial decision-making systems.
This item is a preprint. The final published article can be viewed at: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40368
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Authors. Preprint available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number European Commission - HORIZON 2020 647704 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Feb 2022 07:40 |
Last Modified: | 25 Feb 2022 07:40 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40368 |
Status: | Submitted |
Publisher: | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory |
Identification Number: | 10.1101/394460 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:184027 |