Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107010330 ISBN 13: 9781107010338

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Hélène Landemore is a graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Sciences Po, Paris, and Harvard University (PhD, 2008). She is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press 2013; David and Elaine Spitz Prize 2015).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107010330
• ISBN 13: 9781107010338
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 418
• Editor: Landemore Hélène, Elster Jon