The Phenomenon Behind: Many Minds Decide Better than One
You might have asked yourself many times in life, how other people made decisions on a specific questions; imagine yourself in an exam situation and you have to find the right answer. You are unsure which answer is correct. You just do not want to be the only one deciding incorrectly. What if the results of the others could help you decide? If the goal was to obtain the best answer, it is better to be informed about the decision of others than either uninformed or misinformed of their subjective conclusions. In short, the more information one has, the greater chance for optimal advice to be obtained.
WHY DOES A CROWD DECIDE BETTER THAN AN INDIVIDUAL?
In Nature, some animals prefer living in groups or swarms rather than being alone. Within such a phenomenon, the plethora of sound, individual decisions (with the community in mind) leads to collective wisdom, representing a crucial element to our business model described below.
FINNOQ'S WISDOM OF THE CROWD
In order to anecdotally elaborate this concept, the ETH Zürich conducted an experiment with 144 students. The “collective wisdom” theory was tested in two different ways. A first cohort of the students responded and then received the median responses of all other participants of the study who had answered the same question. The second cohort received the results of all first cohort of participants in advance. The findings left no doubt about crowd wisdom: the students who did not previously know how the others would have answered the question achieved an overall better result. This is one of many examples where crowd wisdom is not only useful, but achieves a better and further-optimized result for decision makers.
HOW DOES FINNOQ BENEFIT FROM CROWD WISDOM?
Our decentralized protocol for opinion markets is based upon the wisdom of our community. Individual subjective opinions are merged to collective statements about a host of products. However, the individual is left unaware as to how others voted; therefore, the factors influencing crowd wisdom and the ultimate reliability of statements negatively are prevented. Subsequently, a principal advantage for the Finnoq user arises: due to collective wisdom, reliable and individually-anonymous statements can be generated for every Finnoq user on the platform.