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Epistemic democracy with defensible premises

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  • Dietrich, Franz
  • Spiekermann, Kai

Abstract

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the `wisdom of crowds'. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises -- voter independence -- is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem's misleading conclusion that `large crowds are infallible'. We prove a more useful jury theorem: under defensible premises, `large crowds are fallible but better than small groups'. This theorem rehabilitates the importance of deliberation and education, which appear inessential in the classical jury framework. Our theorem is related to Ladha's (1993) seminal jury theorem for interchangeable (`indistinguishable') voters based on de Finetti's Theorem. We prove a more general and simpler version of such a theorem.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 40135.

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Date of creation: Oct 2010
Date of revision: Jun 2012
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:40135

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Related research

Keywords: Condorcet Jury Theorem; dependence between voters; common causes; interchangeable voters; de Finetti's Theorem;

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References

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  1. Dietrich, Franz & List, Christian, 2004. "A model of jury decisions where all jurors have the same evidence," Open Access publications from Maastricht University urn:nbn:nl:ui:27-15422, Maastricht University.
  2. redakce, 2012. "n/a," Ekonomika a Management, University of Economics, Prague, vol. 2012(1), pages 72-73.
  3. Serguei Kaniovski, 2010. "Aggregation of correlated votes and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 69(3), pages 453-468, September.
  4. Christian List, 2005. "The probability of inconsistencies in complex collective decisions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 24(1), pages 3-32, 05.
  5. Dietrich, Franz, 2008. "The Premises of Condorcet's Jury Theorem Are Not Simultaneously Justified," Research Memoranda 012, Maastricht : METEOR, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization.
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Cited by:
  1. Marcus Pivato, 2013. "Voting rules as statistical estimators," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 40(2), pages 581-630, February.
  2. Dietrich, Franz & Spiekermann, Kai, 2012. "Independent opinions? on the causal foundations of belief formation and jury theorems," MPRA Paper 40137, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Oct 2010.

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