Making Consensus Tractable

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Statistics Papers
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Bayesian agents
decision by consensus
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Economics
Statistics and Probability
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Mossel, Elchanan
Tamuz, Omer
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We study a model of consensus decision making in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some indication as to which action is optimal. To come to a common decision, the participants perform repeated rounds of voting. In each round, each agent casts a vote in favor of one of the two courses of action, reflecting his or her current belief, and observes the votes of the rest. We provide an efficient algorithm for the calculation the agents have to perform and show that consensus is always reached and that the probability of reaching a wrong decision decays exponentially with the number of agents.

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2013-12-01
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ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
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At the time of publication, author Elchanan Mossel was affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley and Weizmann Institute of Science. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Statistics Department at the University of Pennsylvania.
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