Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at
least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785 …

This paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an
assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the …

Over the last decade, research topics such as learning, heterogeneity, networks, diffusion,
and externalities, have moved from the fringe to the frontier in the social sciences. In large …

Many-minds arguments claim that in some way or another, groups of decisionmakers tend to
make better decisions than individuals. This essay identifies five general and recurring …

This study uses recent theoretical work about group decision-making to assess the quality of
decision-making by expert consensus panels. We specifically examine (1) when individual …

Issues related to collective decision making and to Condorcet jury theorems have been
studied and publicly discussed for over two hundred years. Recently, there is a burgeoning …

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven by instrumental and expressive
motives. We show that arbitrarily small amounts of expressive motives significantly affect …

In a homogeneous jury, in which each vote is correct with the same probability, and each
pair of votes correlates with the same correlation coefficient, there exists a correlation-robust …

Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty (a patient has condition C), and the
evidenceEthat a majority ofhout ofnindependent jurors (diagnostic tests) have voted for H …

Direct democracy, where each voter casts one vote, fails when the average voter
competence falls below 50%. This happens in noisy settings when voters have limited …