Getting it Right: Communication, Voting, and Collective Truth Finding

Valeria Burdea and Jonathan Woon
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Jonathan Woon: University of Pittsburgh

No 443, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: We conduct an experiment in which groups are tasked with evaluating the truth of a set of politically relevant facts and statements, and we investigate whether communication improves information aggregation and the accuracy of group decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of communication depends on the underlying accuracy of individual judgments. Communication improves accuracy when individuals tend to be incorrect, but diminishes it when individuals are likely to be correct ex ante. We also find that when groups vote independently without communicating, subjects update their beliefs in a manner consistent with interpreting others' votes as mildly informative signals, but not when they communicate beforehand. The chat analysis suggests that group members use communication to present their knowledge of related facts and to engage in interactive reasoning. Moreover, the volume of both types of communication increases with item difficulty.

Keywords: collective decisions; voting; communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
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