What to tell? Wise communication and wise crowd

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.