Contemporary methods for identifying and leveraging expertise in collective decision-making

Abstract

From company board committees to grand juries to political parties, decision making often involves a group of individuals with differing views on what the best decision may be. Individuals have different views, in part, because some individuals have more knowledge than others. In theory, decision makers can make better decisions by leveraging the expertise of individuals in the crowd by identifying those who have more knowledge than others. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to identify and leverage expertise in practice. Decision makers often have no records of individuals' past performance from which they can estimate expertise, and subjective measures such as confidence and self-ratings..