Too Good to Be True-Individual and Collective Decision-Making with Misleading Signals

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Fehrler, Sebastian; Hochleitner, Anna; Janas, Moritz
• 署名单位: University of Bremen; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); University of Gothenburg
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2024.06504
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: individual choice; collective choice; Correlated signals; information aggregation; COMMUNICATION; voting; committees

摘要

In many situations, an abundance of misleading evidence-such as fake customer reviews-can lead to false or deceptive conclusions. We experimentally investigate individual and collective decision-making in an information structure in which signals can be correlated, depending on the state of the world. In this setting, too much evidence pointing in one direction has the potential to mislead, necessitating a level of sophistication for rational decisionmaking. Overall, participants' performance is poor with only small differences in collective and individual decision-making accuracy. Interestingly, the more complex environment tends to encourage greater honesty within heterogeneous groups than a benchmark setting with independent signals, thus corroborating a rather subtle game-theoretic prediction.