Independent opinions? on the causal foundations of belief formation and jury theorems

Franz Dietrich and Kai Spiekermann

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: It is often claimed that opinions are more likely to be correct if they are held independently by many individuals. But what does it mean to hold independent opinions? To clarify this condition, we distinguish four notions of probabilistic opinion independence. Which notion applies depends on environmental factors such as commonly perceived evidence, or, more formally, on the causal network in which people interact and form their opinions. In a general theorem, we identify conditions on this network that guarantee opinion independence in each sense. Our results have implications for `wisdom of crowds' arguments, as we illustrate by providing old and new jury theorems.

Keywords: Condorcet Jury Theorem; dependence between voters; probabilistic dependence; causal dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C0 D7 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07, Revised 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-net
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/40137/1/MPRA_paper_40137.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/80740/1/MPRA_paper_40137.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Independent opinions? On the causal foundations of belief formation and jury theorems (2013)
Working Paper: Independent opinions? On the causal foundations of belief formation and jury theorems (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:40137

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