MC 5501
Speaker
Title
Decisions in heterogeneous social groups
Abstract
Drift-diffusion models are widely used to model how humans and other animals make decisions under uncertainty. I will show how extending these models to social groups can give interesting insights into collective decisions of rational agents. For instance, the order in which decisions are made can strongly impact their accuracy: In large groups the first agents to decide almost always hold the strongest initial bias and decide accordingly. Slow agents, conversely, decide as if they held no initial bias. This shows that in groups of rational agents using the same decision criterion, all agents are equally confident in their decisions even when their accuracy differs dramatically. In the second part of the talk I will discuss a normative model of collective foraging in which agents choose whether to commit to costly exploration or remain idle. Rewards and information shared throughout the group. An optimal policy can be readily found using dynamic programming and can be studied using asymptotic analysis. However, how such policy can be implemented without coordination across the population is unclear. I will show that optimal performance can be achieved even without coordination when the community is heterogeneous and consists of a small, diverse subset of risk-taking scouts, and a majority of synchronized deliberators who commit only when conditions are likely to be rewarding.