Two Sides of Collective Decision Making - Votes from Crowd and Knowledge from Experts

Abstract

This paper deals with the role of experts and crowds in solving important societal issues. The authors argue that both experts and crowds are important stakeholders in collective decision making which should jointly participate in the decision-making process to improve it. Usually studied in different research areas, there have been a few models that integrate crowds and experts in a joint model. The authors give an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of crowd and expert decision making and highlight possibilities to connect these two worlds. They position the research in the area of Computational Social Choice (COMSOC) and crowd voting, emerging fields that bring great potential for collective decision making. COMSOC focuses on improving social welfare and the quality of products and services through the inclusion of community or clients into the decision-making process. Despite these altruistic goals, there are several shortcomings that call for the engagement of experts in voting procedures. The authors propose a simple participatory model for weighting and selection of voters and votes through the integration of expert rankings into crowd voting systems.