05-10-2017
Salle de Visio-Conference: Geoazur (Batiment 4), 250 Rue Albert Einstein, 06560, Valbonne
When? Thursday 5 October from 10:30-12:30
Where? Salle de Visio-Conference: Geoazur (Batiment 4), 250 Rue Alberto Einstein, 06560, Valbonne
Who? Drazen Prelec, Neuroeconomics Lab, MIT Sloan School of Management
What?
Title: Finding truth when most people are wrong
Abstract: The question whether to trust the judgments of a few experts or the wisdom-of-the-crowd is not just of scientific but also of political and philosophical interest. Crowd wisdom is usually defined as consensus — the majority vote or the median estimate or forecast. This principle seems fair and simple, but it has a blind spot for information that is new or unfamiliar. The cost of wrong collective decisions can be high in terms of environmental risks underestimated, or promising ideas ignored. The challenge is to combine the virtues of a ‘democratic’ procedure, which allows anyone, irrespective of credentials, to register an opinion, with an 'elitist’ outcome that associates truth with the judgments of a select few. I will describe a simple alternative to democratic averaging by a panel or online crowd. The alternative principle is to select judgments that receive more support than predicted by those same people. I will review some recent evidence bearing on this approach, and discuss extensions to forecasting.
This seminar will be held jointly with the IMéRA Community Building Seminar (CBS) and will take place at the IMéERA in Marseille.
https://imera.univ-amu.fr/fr/community-building-seminar-1-drazen-prelec
About Video Conference Seminar “Experiments in Social Sciences”: This is a monthly interdisciplinary seminar jointly organized by Researchers in Marseille (AMSE), Nice (GREDEG), Genova, and Paris (ENS), by using video conferencing system. Speakers will be present in one of the four locations (which differ depending on the session), while people from other locations participate to the seminar using video conference system.