Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 106; no. 5; pp. 1347 - 1352
• Main Authors: Kearns, Michael, Judd, Stephen, Tan, Jinsong, Wortman, Jennifer
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Academy of Sciences 03.02.2009; National Acad Sciences
• Subjects: Behavior; Bias; Connectivity; Cumulative distribution functions; Decision Making; economic behavior; Experimentation; Experiments; Family structure; Group incentives; Group performance; Humans; Minority influence; motivation; Neighborhoods; Physical Sciences; Preferences; Social Sciences; Vertices; Voting; Voting behavior
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808147106

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.