Informational Openness Enhances Decentralized Decision-Making: A Cognitive Agent Based Study

Abstract

Collaborative decision making is central to the organization of society. Juries deliberate cases, voters elect government officials, open innovation networks converge on innovative solutions. It is common to think of such groups as decision making entities. But this language is imprecise. Real decision processes do not occur within any group or organization as an abstract entity. Collaborative decision making happens within and between autonomous individuals. This emphasizes the importance of the relationships between individual and social decision-making processes to social organization. Despite a rich body of literature on collaborative decision making we know little about how individuals decide to commit to group decision making in the first place, and how, once joined, they communicate their distributed information for optimal group performance. We introduce a general framework designed to model collaborative decision processes. Our main results are that 1) commitment and gain is enhanced when groups are designed so agents have realistic knowledge about the forgone gains and losses associated with abstaining from the group; and 2) that this effect is accelerated when communication between group members conveys more information about individual preferences. We thus demonstrate that collaborative decision making is done best when it is done by groups that are informationally open.