Paper Info
Title
Towards large-scale deliberative decision-making: small groups and the importance of triads.
Abstract
Though deliberation is a critical component of democratic decision-making, existing deliberative processes do not scale to large groups of people. Motivated by this, we propose a model in which large-scale decision-making takes place through a sequence of small group interactions. Our model considers a group of participants, each having an opinion which together form a graph. We show that for median graphs, a class of graphs including grids and trees, it is possible to use a small number of three-person interactions to tightly approximate the wisdom of the crowd, defined here to be the generalized median of participant opinions, even when agents are strategic. Interestingly, we also show that this sharply contrasts with small groups of size two, for which we prove an impossibility result. Specifically, we show that it is impossible to use sequences of two-person interactions satisfying natural axioms to find a tight approximation of the generalized median, even when agents are non-strategic. Our results demonstrate the potential of small group interactions for reaching global decision-making properties.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2940716.2940722
EC
Keywords
DocType
Volume
participatory and deliberative democracy,decision-making at scale,wisdom of the crowd,triadic consensus,small groups
Conference
abs/1605.08143
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
3
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ashish Goel13039244.56
David Lee219521.40