NDLI: Decision Dynamics in Groups with Interacting Members

Content Provider	Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Author	Caginalp, Reginald J. Doiron, Brent
Copyright Year	2017
Abstract	Group decisions involve the combination of evidence accumulation by individual members and direct member-to-member interactions. We consider a simplified framework of two deciders, each undergoing a two alternative forced choice task, with the choices of early deciding members biasing members who have yet to choose. We model decision dynamics as a drift-diffusion process and present analysis of the associated Fokker--Planck equation for the group. We show that the probability of coordinated group decisions (both members make the same decision) is maximized by setting the decision threshold of one member to a lower value than its neighbor's. This result is akin to a speed-accuracy tradeoff, where the penalty of lowering the decision threshold is choice inaccuracy while the benefit is that earlier decisions have a higher probability of influencing the other member. We numerically extend these results to large group decisions, where it is shown that by choosing the appropriate parameters, a small but decisive sub-group of the population can have a large amount of influence on the total group.
Starting Page	1543
Ending Page	1562
Page Count	20
File Format	PDF
DOI	10.1137/16M1090922
e-ISSN	15360040
Issue Number	3
Volume Number	16
Language	English
Publisher	Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Publisher Date	2017-08-17
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	diffusion processes decision theory General biology and biomathematics group decision making models Applications of stochastic analysis decision aggregation
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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