Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms

James Madison wrote, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one. With backgrounds in economics, cognitive science, political science, law, and history, the authors consider information markets, the Internet, jury debates, democratic deliberation, and the use of diversity as mechanisms for improving collective decisions. At the same time, they consider voter irrationality and paradoxes of aggregation as possibly undermining the wisdom of groups. Implicitly or explicitly, the volume also offers guidance and warnings to institutional designers.

Author: Hélène Landemore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 05/01/2014
Pages: 420
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.41lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.93d
ISBN: 9781107630277

About the Author
Elster, Jon: - Jon Elster has been a professor at the Collège de France since 2005. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, the Norwegian Academy of Science and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Valencia, Stockholm, Trondheim, Bogotá, Torcuata di Tella and Louvain-la-Neuve. Elster is the author of 23 monographs, which have been translated into 18 languages. Most recently, these include L'Irrationalité; Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist; Le Désintéressement; Explaining Social Behavior; Agir contre soi; Closing the Books; and Alchemies of the Mind.Landemore, Hélène: - Hélène Landemore is a graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Sciences Po, Paris, and Harvard University (PhD, 2008). After holding postdoctoral positions at the Collège de France in Paris, Brown University, and MIT, she is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Hume: probabilité et choix raisonnable (2004). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Raison Publique, Synthese, Critical Review and Political Psychology.

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