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A List Apart: Articles: The Wisdom of Community
The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not. Anyone who’s seen an angry mob knows it. But crowds, presented with the right challenge and the right interface, can be wise. When it works, the crowd is wiser, in fact, than any single participant. You need a few things to enable online crowds to be wise: Simplicity. Interface. Aggregation. Participation. Selfishness. Scores. Leaderboards. Explicit vs Implicit Feedback. Voting.
Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
Mobs Rule! : Andrew McAfee’s Blog
On the Internet they’ve been shown to deliver more accurate predictions about political elections and movie revenues than other techniques like polls and statistical forecasting methods. Pioneering efforts to use them within companies show that they’re also highly accurate when deployed behind the firewall (see, for example, the case I wrote with Karim Lakhani and Peter Coles about Google’s internal prediction market and this paper written by Google’s Bo Cowgill and his colleagues).
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