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Edited by Ronald L. Graham, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and approved December 5, 2008 (received for review August 19, 2008)
Abstract
Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks of individuals. In each of 81 experiments, 36 human subjects arranged in a virtual network were financially motivated to reach global consensus to one of two opposing choices. No payments were made unless the entire population reached a unanimous decision within 1 min, but different subjects were paid more for consensus to one choice or the other, and subjects could view only the current choices of their network neighbors, thus creating tensions between private incentives and preferences, global unity, and network structure. Along with analyses of how collective and individual performance vary with network structure and incentives generally, we find that there are well-studied network topologies in which the minority preference consistently wins globally; that the presence of “extremist” individuals, or the awareness of opposing incentives, reliably improve collective performance; and that certain behavioral characteristics of individual subjects, such as “stubbornness,” are strongly correlated with earnings.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mkearns{at}cis.upenn.edu
Author contributions: M.K., S.J., J.T., and J.W. designed research; M.K., S.J., J.T., and J.W. performed research; M.K., S.J., J.T., and J.W. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; M.K., S.J., J.T., and J.W. analyzed data; and M.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
- © 2009 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks
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