Epistemic democracy with defensible premises

Franz Dietrich and Kai Spiekermann

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the `wisdom of crowds'. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises -- voter independence -- is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that `large crowds are infallible'. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, `large crowds are fallible but better than small groups'. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (`indistinguishable') voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We prove a more general and simpler version of such a theorem.

Keywords: Condorcet Jury Theorem; dependence between voters; common causes; interchangeable voters; de Finetti's Theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C0 D70 D71 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10, Revised 2012-06
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/40135/1/MPRA_paper_40135.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Epistemic democracy with defensible premises (2013)
Working Paper: Epistemic democracy with defensible premises (2013)
Working Paper: Epistemic democracy with defensible premises (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:40135

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