2007/12/01 by Kevin Zollman, Kevin J. S. Zollman · 14 citations
Decision Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Game Theory and Applications #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
paper · doi:10.1086/525605
Increasingly, epistemologists are becoming interested in social structures and their effect on epistemic enterprises, but little attention has been paid to the proper distribution of experimental results among scientists. This paper will analyze a model first suggested by two economists, which nicely captures one type of learning situation faced by scientists. The results of a computer simulation study of this model provide two interesting conclusions. First, in some contexts, a community of scientists is, as a whole, more reliable when its members are less aware of their colleagues’ experimental results. Second, there is a robust tradeoff between the reliability of a community and the speed with which it reaches a correct conclusion.