Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds

Knowledge.Wharton discussesDownloading Wisdom from Online Crowds. Excerpt:
"Specifically, Saiz, in the real estate department, and Simonsohn, in operations and information management, argue in a new research paper that the likelihood that a topic is discussed online, in relation to a given location, correlates with its relative prevalence in the real world. "We are interested in the possible 'wisdom' resulting from the aggregation of a very specific kind of judgment, namely, the determination of which topic is worth writing about," they write in a paper titled, "Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds." For example, they wanted to discern which countries, U.S. states and big U.S. cities people perceived as the most corrupt. So they plugged the appropriate terms into a search engine called Exalead. By assessing how many documents contained the word "corruption" within the same paragraph as the location's name, they came up with corresponding corruption rankings."

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