Collective Decision Research Articles

Action-based confidence sharing and collective decision making

Joint action research explores how multiple humans can coordinate their movements to achieve common goals. When there is uncertainty about the joint goal, individuals need to integrate their perceptual information of the environment to collaboratively determine their new goal. To ensure that a group reaches a consensus about the goal, collective decision making among the individuals is required. Collective decision making can be facilitated by nonverbal expressions of opinions and associated confidence levels. Here, we show that confidence sharing in groups of 2, 3, and 4 individuals can be studied using their trajectories when jointly moving toward one of several options. We found that both opinions and confidence levels can be distinguished in individual movement trajectories, and found that movement features can predict an individual's influence. Our results suggest that movement trajectories are a valid way to study confidence sharing in human collective decision making.

Decision as ritual: How power structure affects collective tourism destination decision-making

The optimal destination decision made by a group is the one that perfectly balances group utility maximization with individual satisfaction. The power structure of the group and personal interactions underpinning group decision-making will directly determine individuals’ evaluations of and emotions generated by these decisions. However, research has not sufficiently revealed this pattern, which limits our understanding of how optimal group decisions can be made. By integrating the power perspective with the theory of interactive ritual chains, this study applies the experiential focus group observation method to track the decision-making process. The analysis produces six models of that process, which show how different power structures and leadership influence the joint focus of attention, shared mood and behavioral co-presence in reaching a decision. In summary, leader democracy and effective equality can create a rewarding situation, influencer dominance creates a paradoxical situation, while, multiple leadership, ineffective equality and leader dominance lead to a ritualistic punishment situation.

Technical Debt Monitoring Decision Making with Skin in the Game

Technical Debt Management (TDM) can suffer from unpredictability, communication gaps and the inaccessibility of relevant information, which hamper the effectiveness of its decision making. These issues can stem from division among decision-makers which takes root in unfair consequences of decisions among different decision-makers. One mitigation route is Skin in the Game thinking, which enforces transparency, fairness and shared responsibility during collective decision-making under uncertainty. This article illustrates characteristics which require Skin in the Game thinking in Technical Debt (TD) identification, measurement, prioritisation and monitoring. We point out crucial problems in TD monitoring rooted in asymmetric information and asymmetric payoff between different factions of decision-makers. A systematic TD monitoring method is presented to mitigate the said problems. The method leverages Replicator Dynamics and Behavioural Learning. The method supports decision-makers with automated TD monitoring decisions; it informs decision-makers when human interventions are required. Two publicly available industrial projects with a non-trivial number of TD and timestamps are utilised to evaluate the application of our method. Mann–Whitney U hypothesis tests are conducted on samples of decisions from our method and the baseline. The statistical evidence indicates that our method can produce cost-effective and contextual TD monitoring decisions.

A large-scale field experiment on participatory decision-making in China.

Can local democratic decision-making in authoritarian environments increase or pacify civic engagement and government accountability? Here we conducted an intervention reaching over 20 million people in China. Communities were randomly assigned such that citizens in treatment communities were invited to deliberate and make collective decisions on how local community budgets were allocated through both in-person and online communication channels (participatory budgeting). We find that participatory decision-making in community budgeting increased a wide range of civic-engagement behaviours outside of the budgeting domain 6 months after the start of the intervention. Residents in treatment communities reported more need for improvement from the central government, providing a potential foundation for seeking accountability from the authoritarian regime. These changes were accompanied by a more positive societal outlook and increased satisfaction in the country's policies.

Developmental approach of safety in ergonomics/human factors: insights of constructed safety in six work environments

This article brings together works on the concept of constructed safety in ergonomics, carried out over the last twenty-five years. Firstly, we situate this approach to safety in relation to previously developed existing models (e.g. regulated and managed safety) with regard to the development of activity-centred ergonomics. We then present six research actions in activity-centred ergonomics from a selection of different fields, from small companies to the industry of the future in an international group: public works, hospitals, aeronautical industry, railway transport, agriculture, and chemical industry, in order to describe constructed safety applications. The results highlight that constructed safety is respectively raised by mutual knowledge between workers and management, collective decision making, collective reflexive work on safety rules, spatiotemporal articulation of the different safety sources, knowledge integration on pesticide exposure situations by designers and regulation, social regulation sustaining risk understanding and safety aspect involving a diversity of actors (workers, preventionists, managers, local residents and public authorities). By focusing on the analysis of actual safety practices in real work and real exposure situations, constructed safety aims to account for the way in which safety is deployed on a daily basis to meet production and health objectives. This understanding contributes to the design of safe work systems in a developmental way and to propose an operating model of constructed safety.

Employing the intellectual virtues to better understand argumentation interventions in education

Argumentation-based classroom interventions are a growing alternative for stimulating conceptual learning, thinking, and communicative skills. However, not all classroom argumentation is desired, nor does every argumentation design lead students to develop their abilities and understanding. In the educational literature, productive argumentation has been associated particularly with deliberation due to the design properties that deliberative practices demand from students, such as collaborating towards a goal, revising one’s own opinion, listening to others, and changing their minds when it is necessary to arrive at a collective decision or problem resolution. We contend that what makes deliberation productive is not argumentation in itself, but how a certain type of design scaffolds students into virtuous-like behavior, which can be the enabling condition for productive argumentation in classroom activities. Through the exploration of three cases of classroom argumentation and discussion experiences, we hypothesize that virtuous-like behavior may serve as an enabling condition for each intervention. In particular, intellectually humble behaviors could be scaffolded within these interventions because all three create the proper environment for students to revise their own positions, listen carefully to others, and change their minds in light of appropriate reasoning or new evidence. Employing an intellectual virtues framework, advances our understanding of how to design classroom environments for productive argumentation. This paper thus presents a novel and pioneering approach to understanding argumentation in the classroom by incorporating the concept of intellectual virtues, bridging the gap between virtues and traditional research, and offering fresh perspectives on the field.

Peran Modal Sosial dalam Usaha Tani Kopi Arabika di Desa Kendenan Kecamatan Baraka Kabupaten Enrekang

This research aims to determine the role of social capital in Arabica coffee farming in Kendenan Village, Baraka District, Enrekang Regency. This research uses a purposive sampling technique for taking informants, namely informants who are determined deliberately. The data analysis technique used is qualitative, including data reduction analysis, data presentation and drawing conclusions. The results of this research show that coffee farmers in Kendenan Village have a high element of trust by adopting an honest, open and respectful attitude. Social norms still apply in developing Arabica coffee farming, farmers are limited by rules that are understood verbally or unwritten. We can see the close social network through communication and cooperation that is built between fellow farmers, traders and extension workers. The reciprocal relationship between Arabica coffee farmers helps each other, pays attention to each other and helps each other, making it easier to complete work in coffee farming. The role of social capital in developing coffee farming is transaction costs, sharing information, collective decision making

Investment and remanufacturing strategies considering the application of intelligent manufacturing in hybrid manufacturing–remanufacturing systems

The development of data science and sensing technologies provides opportunities to mitigate uncertainty in hybrid manufacturing–remanufacturing systems, and drives manufacturers to invest in intelligent manufacturing (IM). This paper considers the adoption of IM to mitigate classification errors in the end-of-use (EoU) products’ acquisition while improving the operational efficiency of manufacturing–remanufacturing systems. By constructing game models, we jointly investigate the investment, pricing, production and order quantities, and collection decisions in a closed-loop supply chain. Interestingly, we find that IM does not always increase manufacturers’ enthusiasm to engage in remanufacturing, firms’ profits or consumer surplus. It does not always reduce environmental impact either. Analytical results show that IM reduces manufacturers’ enthusiasm to engage in remanufacturing if the initial core misclassification rate is low. Furthermore, we identify key factors that impact the firms’ profits, consumer surplus, and carbon emissions. For a manufacturer producing high-cost new products, investing in IM hurts its profits when the remanufacturing cost savings due to intelligent manufacturing is small and the manufacturing benefit due to IM is not significant. Moreover, investing in IM reduces consumer surplus if the cost of new products is high, and the IM does not lead to significant remanufacturing cost saving and manufacturing benefit increase. The results reveal that investing in IM is preferred from the environmental point of view if the IM-induced manufacturing cost saving is small. Our research provides management insights into the intelligent transformation of manufacturers with hybrid manufacturing–remanufacturing systems, as well as policymakers concerned with value creation for customers and environmental impacts.

Evaluating multimodal AI in medical diagnostics

This study evaluates multimodal AI models’ accuracy and responsiveness in answering NEJM Image Challenge questions, juxtaposed with human collective intelligence, underscoring AI’s potential and current limitations in clinical diagnostics. Anthropic’s Claude 3 family demonstrated the highest accuracy among the evaluated AI models, surpassing the average human accuracy, while collective human decision-making outperformed all AI models. GPT-4 Vision Preview exhibited selectivity, responding more to easier questions with smaller images and longer questions.

Honeybee-like collective decision making in a kilobot swarm

Drawing inspiration from honeybee swarms' nest-site selection process, we assess the ability of a kilobot robot swarm to replicate this captivating example of collective decision making. Honeybees locate the optimal site for their new nest by aggregating information about potential locations and exchanging it through their waggle dance. The complexity and elegance of solving this problem rely on two key abilities of scout honeybees: self-discovery and imitation, symbolizing and , respectively. We employ a mathematical model to represent this nest-site selection problem and program our kilobots to follow its rules. Our experiments demonstrate that the kilobot swarm can collectively reach consensus decisions in a decentralized manner, akin to honeybees. However, the strength of this consensus depends not only on the interplay between independence and interdependence but also on critical factors such as swarm density and the motion of kilobots. These factors enable the formation of a percolated communication network, through which each robot can receive information beyond its immediate vicinity. By shedding light on this crucial layer of complexity—the crowding and mobility conditions during the decision making—we emphasize the significance of factors typically overlooked but essential to living systems and life itself. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

The effect of nonlinear environmental feedback on the outcomes of evolutionary dynamics

In this paper, we construct a nonlinear evolutionary game model to analyze the cooperation mechanisms of the population based on a nonlinear relationship among environment and strategies. In the model, replicator dynamics and aspiration dynamics are used to explore the evolutionary outcomes of collective decision, respectively. The results suggest that the environment tends to become progressively more affluent as the number of cooperators increases, if there is a smaller intensity of environmental destruction of defectors. Interestingly, the enriched environments may attract more defectors. Hence, the population requires a higher level of vigilance against plentiful environments in response to the emergence of defectors. As opposed to replicator dynamics, aspiration dynamics can avoid the persistent oscillatory loops due to the level of aspiration. Further, we investigate the effect of complexity between the population strategy and the environment on the evolutionary outcomes. It is found that higher level of complexity can drive the environment closer to a state of affluence, but the population's strategy structure will not be modified. These insights into the relationship between environment and strategies further our understanding of the evolutionary mechanism of population and society.

The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to elucidate common principles that drive human and other animal societies to adopt either a warlike or peaceful nature. One proposed explanation for the variation in aggression between human societies is the democratic peace hypothesis. According to this theory, autocracies are more warlike than democracies because autocratic leaders can pursue fights for private gain. However, autocratic and democratic decision-making processes are not unique to humans and are widely observed across a diverse range of non-human animal societies. We use evolutionary game theory to evaluate whether the logic of democratic peace may apply across taxa; specifically adapting the classic Hawk-Dove model to consider conflict decisions made by groups rather than individuals. We find support for the democratic peace hypothesis without mechanisms involving complex human institutions and discuss how these findings might be relevant to non-human animal societies. We suggest that the degree to which collective decisions are shared may explain variation in the intensity of intergroup conflict in nature.

An integrated method for shared power bank supplier selection based on linguistic hesitant fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making

With the increasing number of smartphone users, the potential of the shared power bank industry is increasing. The shared power bank supplier selection can be regarded as a multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problem with linguistic hesitant fuzzy (LHF) sets (LHFSs). This paper proposes a linguistic hesitant fuzzy MCGDM method based on the MULITMOORA (Multi-Objective Optimization on basis of a Ratio Analysis plus the Full Multiplicative form), the BWM (best and worst method), and the prospect theory (PT). Firstly, a new comparison approach of LHFSs is proposed. We propose the LHF Bonferroni mean (BM), the LHF weighted BM and the LHF generalized weighted BM (LHFGWBM) operators. The decision makers’ weights are acquired via a tri-objective optimization model. This paper extends the BWM to obtain the subjective criteria weights and employs the entropy to acquire the objective criteria weights. The comprehensive criteria weights are generated by the Jenson-Shannon divergence. The LHFGWBM operator is used to generate the collective decision matrix. The comprehensive prospect value decision matrix is obtained. Then, we propose the PT-based MULTIMOORA method for LHF MCGDM. An example of shared power bank supplier selection is used to show the superiorities of the proposed LHF MCGDM method.

ABCDE assessment for palliative care truth-telling dilemmas: a case study.

In Indonesia, the diagnosis of a serious illness is often mediated through the patient's family, reflecting the cultural importance of family involvement in the patient's care and collective decision-making. To use a case study to show the difficulty that healthcare professionals face telling the patient the truth about their condition in Indonesia. The Kagawa-Singer and Blackhall ABCDE framework was used during truth-telling dilemmas to assess patients' and families' attitudes (A), beliefs (B), contexts (C), decision-making styles (D) and environments (E). Studies have shown that family involvement in health-related communications can alleviate the stress associated with the disclosure of a serious illness. Palliative care nurses must acknowledge the importance of family in the patient's cultural context, by involving them in the disclosure of a diagnosis and disease trajectory by integrating every element of the ABCDE model in palliative care.

Social Dynamics and Prediction Accuracy in Collective Decisions: Intuitive vs Scientific Approaches

Social Dynamics and Prediction Accuracy in Collective Decisions: Intuitive vs Scientific Approaches

The Finishing Space Value for Shooting Decision-Making in High-Performance Football.

Football players' decision-making behaviours near the scoring target (finishing situations) emerge from the evolving spatiotemporal information directly perceived in the game's landscape. In finishing situations, the ball carrier's decision-making about shooting or passing is not an individual decision-making process, but a collective decision that is guided by players' perceptions of match affordances. To sustain this idea, we collected spatiotemporal information and built a model to quantify the "Finishing Space Value" (FSV) that results from players' perceived affordances about two main questions: (a) is the opponent's target successfully reachable from a given pitch location?; and (b) from each given pitch location, the opposition context will allow enough space to shoot (low adversaries' interference)? The FSV was calculated with positional data from high-performance football matches, combining information extracted from Voronoi diagrams (VD) with distances and angles to the goal line. FSV was tested using as a reference the opinion of a "panel of expert" (PE), composed by football coaches, about a questionnaire presenting 50 finishing situations. Results showed a strong association between the subjective perception scale used by the PE to assess how probable a shot made by the ball carrier could result in a goal and FSV calculated for that same situation (R2=0.6706). Moreover, we demonstrate the accuracy of the FSV quantification model in predicting coaches' opinions about what should be the "best option" to finish the play. Overall, results indicated that the FSV is a promising model to capture the affordances of the shooting circumstances for the ball carrier's decision-making in high-performance football. FSV might be useful for more precise match analysis and informing coaches in the design of representative practice tasks.

Management of Context-Specific Knowledge Creation and Application through Collective Social Responsibility in School?Community Partnerships

In knowledge-based institutions such as schools, productivity is associated with effective creation and application of operational knowledge. Using collective fingers theory, this qualitative case study explored how a considerably effective partnership between a South African township secondary school and a network of community organizations/structures, facilitated the creation and application of context-specific and socially responsive knowledge that led to improved internal school conditions, problem solving strategies, poverty alleviation, and extension of social support to vulnerable learners and their families. Based on the thematic analysis drawn from utterances of eight purposefully sampled participants, the study showed that the school’s promotion of common purpose, mutual respect, collective decision making, care for others, collective social responsibility and democratic leadership practices contributed to the success of its mutually beneficial partnership with relevant community networks. It also emerged that by going an extra mile to lobby for multisectoral social support, the school richly benefited from the benevolence of a wide network of government departments; private-corporate sector and local businesses; faith-based formations; and non-governmental organizations some of which offered similar or overlapping services while others offered a diverse range of services to the school. The study proposed that the school must minimize the frequency of late arrival and unwarranted early recusals in knowledge production meetings. It further called for increased cultural capital and inclusion of parents from lower socioeconomic households in decision-making processes; and elimination of procurement policy red tape that occasionally delayed the provision of much-needed social support to schools, families and learners.

Indonesia’s social protection system: the relevance of informal social protection to strengthen adaptation to climate change

ABSTRACT Social protection is praised as a multipurpose instrument to protect the most vulnerable people and ensure socioeconomic development. Recently, this approach has also been recognized by climate scientists. Over the past few decades, Indonesia, a highly exposed and vulnerable country facing climate change, has increased its efforts to protect all marginalized and vulnerable groups. However, the high uncertainty of social and economic impacts triggered by climate and environmental change increases pressure on the social protection system, leading to a rising need for deeper and broader coverage, especially among the most vulnerable people. This paper argues that vulnerable groups have built their own systems to be socially protected, which we refer to as informal social protection (ISP). Given that there is little reference to these particular structures in the literature on social protection, this study aims to explore their relevance and potential challenges. Jakarta, a highly urbanized and vulnerable city, was used as a case study. The city is simultaneously challenged by the increasingly adverse impacts of climate change. Gaps in formal social protection (FSP) will be analysed using qualitative and quantitative data to assess how and to what extent the most vulnerable groups are protected and whether ISP structures can fill the identified gaps. The results show that ISP can function as a solution to protect marginalized and vulnerable groups; however, more information is needed to ensure security considering long-term developments and increased future uncertainties. HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS STUDY FSP coverage in Indonesia still has gaps due to unregistered target groups, such as the missing middle population and informal sector workers. The uncertainty of the social and economic impacts caused by climate change increases pressure on the social protection system, leading to a greater need for broader coverage. ISP provides vulnerable groups with flexibility, local specificity, mutual benefits and reciprocity, collective decision-making, social cohesion, and trust. ISP involves community-based adaptation and support from NGOs to enhance ISP and make it more adaptive. ISP supports vulnerable groups affected by the unintended consequences of adaptation measures implemented by the government.

Synthesis of Optimal Correction Functions in the Class of Disjunctive Normal Forms

The paper proposes to consider individual heuristics as unreliably operating parts of the information processing system. In a separate case, several different heuristics are adopted to solve the same problem, and the results obtained are adjusted in a certain way. In this case, problems arise that are close in methodology to the problems of synthesizing reliable circuits from unreliable elements or making a collective expert decision. The work solves the problem of constructing an optimal correction function based on control material; classes of functions of k-valued logic under monotonicity restrictions are studied. A theorem on the completeness of the class of monotonic functions of k-valued logic for arbitrary k is proved, and a basis in the given class is proved and constructed. The problem of constructing an optimal corrector in the class of disjunctive normal forms of k-valued functions is solved.

Groundwater Contamination Source Recognition Based on a Two-Stage Inversion Framework with a Deep Learning Surrogate

Groundwater contamination source recognition is an important prerequisite for subsequent remediation efforts. To overcome the limitations of single inversion methods, this study proposed a two-stage inversion framework by integrating two primary inversion approaches—simulation-optimization and simulation-data assimilation—thereby enhancing inversion accuracy. In the first stage, the ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation method (a type of simulation-data assimilation) conducted a global broad search to provide better initial values and ranges for the second stage. In the subsequent stage, a collective decision optimization algorithm (a type of simulation-optimization) was used for a refined deep search, further enhancing the final inversion accuracy. Additionally, a deep learning method, the multilayer perceptron, was utilized to establish a surrogate of the simulation model, reducing computational costs. These theories and methods were applied and validated in a hypothetical scenario for the synchronous identification of the contamination source and boundary conditions. The results demonstrated that the proposed two-stage inversion framework significantly improved search accuracy compared to single inversion methods, with a mean relative error and mean absolute error of just 4.95% and 0.1756, respectively. Moreover, the multilayer perceptron surrogate model offered greater approximation accuracy to the simulation model than the traditional shallow learning surrogate model. Specifically, the coefficient of determination, mean relative error, mean absolute error, and root mean square error were 0.9860, 9.72%, 0.1727, and 0.47, respectively, highlighting its significant advantages. The findings of this study can provide more reliable technical support for practical case applications and improve subsequent remediation efficiency.