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Drazen Prelec

 

 

Wednesday 19th February 2014

Time: 4pm

 

Basement Seminar Room

Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

 

Finding truth even if the crowd is wrong.

(Joint work with Sebastian Seung (Princeton) and John McCoy (MIT))

The current moment may be described as one where crowd-sourcing technologies are rapidly outpacing theory: The internet has made it possible to collect thousands of judgments (reviews, ratings, forecasts) from dispersed individuals, but principles for distilling the “wisdom of the crowd” still draw largely on statistical ideas that would have been familiar to Galton. I will describe an approach based on a new definition of the best answer to a non-verifiable question, as the one given by those who would be “least surprised” by the true answer if that answer were revealed. Since this definition is of interest only when the true answer is unknown, algorithmic implementation is nontrivial. I will present a solution that relies on a secondary input, namely, respondents’ predictions of how other people will respond, and then review recent applications to forecasting political and social events.

BIO
Drazen Prelec has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1991, and presently holds faculty appointments in the Sloan School, the Economics Department, and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving an AB in applied mathematics, Ph.D. in experimental psychology, and a Junior Fellowship from the Society of Fellows. His research interests are behavioral economics / neuroeconomics, and aggregation of opinions in domains where true answers exist in principle but are not verifiable.