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What to tell? Wise communication and wise crowd

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Abstract

This paper investigates how communication influences people’s judgment quality in simple estimation tasks. Except for an exchange of estimates, our design also allows the exchange of supportive evidence underlying the estimates in a controlled manner. Compared with the control treatment, the exchange of estimates and supportive evidence together improves judgment quality at both the individual level and the crowd level. On the other hand, the exchange of estimates or supportive evidence separately has no impact.

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Notes

  1. It is 10% of the true value.

  2. This finding is robust to different thresholds: \(l=0.2\) and \(l=0.4\).

  3. The answers to these tasks are: 48, 64, 29, 18, 1191, 53, 772, 87, 30, 44, 787, 37, 768, 34, 21.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the coordinating teachers at the participating schools for making this study possible. We received helpful comments from Peter Wakker, Amit Kothiyal and seminar participants from the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at Max Planck Institution. Financial supports from Tinbergen Institution and the Econometrics Institute at Erasmus School of Economics are gratefully acknowledged. Ning Liu acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council under the European Community’s Programme“Ideas”—Call identifier: ERC-2013-StG/ERC grant agreement No. 336703, project RISICO “RISk and uncertainty in developing and Implementing Climate change pOlicies”. Chen Li would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Veni grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (N.W.O.) and the EUR fellowship of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.The funding sources had no involvement in the study design, collection of data or the decision to submit the article for publication.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Room H12-29 Erasmus School of Economics, Burgemeester Oudelaan 50, 3062PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Chen Li

  2. School of Economics and Management, New Main Building A1005, Beihang University, Xueyuan Rd. 37, Beijing, 100191, China

    Ning Liu

Authors
  1. Chen Li
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Correspondence to Ning Liu.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Questionnaire

1.1 The ESQ

There are in total 15 questionsFootnote 3. Please make sure you have answered all the questions before handing in the questionnaire.

  1. 1

    ___________ countries in the Asia.

  2. 2

    There are in total ___________ triangles in Fig. 3.

  3. 3

    There are in total ___________ triangles in Fig. 4.

  4. 4

    Feng Xiaogang has so far directed ___________ movies.

  5. 5

    Romance of the Three Kingdoms has in total ___________characters.

  6. 6

    Yang Mi has so far starred in ___________different movies and TV dramas.

  7. 7

    Harry Potter (book series) has in total ___________characters.

  8. 8

    China has won in total ___________medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

  9. 9

    There are currently in total ___________ NBA teams.

  10. 10

    There are currently in total ___________countries in Europe.

  11. 11

    Water Margin has in total ___________characters.

  12. 12

    Tom Cruise has so far starred in ___________different movies.

  13. 13

    Dream of the Red Chamber has in total ___________characters.

  14. 14

    Zhao Wei has so far starred in ___________different movies and TV dramas.

  15. 15

    Zhang Yimou has so far directed ___________movies.

Fig. 3
figure 3

For triangle-counting in Question 2

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Fig. 4
figure 4

For triangle-counting in Question 3

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1.2 The EVQ

figure a

Appendix 2: instructions

Thank you for your participation. This experiment consists of two stages.

During the first stage, you will fill in questionnaire 1 and also write down your answers on a separate answer sheet. You have 25 min to complete this stage, after which the experimenter will collect the questionnaire 1 and the answer sheet.

During the second stage, you will receive questionnaire 2 AND one of your classmates’ answer sheets from the previous stage. When filling in questionnaire 2, you can refer to the answer sheet you received. You have 10 min to finish stage 2. Afterwards, the experimenter will collect all documents and proceed to the payment procedure.

Payment procedure

Please fill the subject ID assigned to you in the top left corner blank on both questionnaires and answer sheets. Questionnaires without a subject ID will not be paid. At the end of the experiment, we will randomly draw eight subject numbers. Students with the eight numbers will be paid according to the accuracies of their answer. Others will receive ten RMB show-up fee. Each student has an equal probability to be drawn.

In case your subject ID is drawn, please go to the payment desk, where you will randomly draw a question number from the 30 questions (15 on Questionnaire 1 and 15 on Questionnaire 2). The experimenter will reveal the correct answer to the question drawn and your payment will be determined as follows:

Your prize is 100 RMB if your answer is within the 5% interval around the correct answer.

Your prize is 50 RMB if your answer is within the 10% interval but out of the 5% interval around the correct answer.

Your prize is 20 RMB if your answer is within the 20% interval but out of the 10% interval around the correct answer.

Your prize is ten RMB if your answer is out of the 20% interval around the correct answer.

No communication is allowed during the experiment. Students who talk with others will be disqualified from the experiment.

Appendix 3: evidence response results

Table 4 Summary of the evidence responses
Full size table
figure b
figure c
Table 5 Evidence accuracy rate and number of blank responses in treatments ECO, EE, and EJE
Full size table

Appendix 4: direct comparisons of accuracy and confidence at the two stages

Table 6 Accuracy, confidence, and their difference across stages
Full size table
Table 7 Accuracy compared between treatments at stage 1
Full size table

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Li, C., Liu, N. What to tell? Wise communication and wise crowd. Theory Decis 90, 279–299 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-020-09784-y

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