Node certainty in collective decision making
Ioannis Poulakakis, Luca Scardovi and Naomi E. Leonard
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Maui, HI,
2012.
This paper brings into focus the relationship between the location of a decision-making
unit in a network of decision makers and its certainty in integrating information toward a decision.
A collection of units, each represented by a Drift-Diffusion Model (DDM), accrues evidence in
continuous time by observing a (noisy) stimulus. Their task is to make a decision that depends
on accurately identifying the stimulus observed. It is shown that common structural centrality
measures based on nodal degree or geodesic distance cannot be used to rank the units according to
their certainty in integrating information. Instead, the variance associated with the state of a
decision-making unit depends on the communication topology in a way that incorporates all
possible paths connecting that unit with the rest.
(159 KB pdf)
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