Academic

Vermeule & List on Collective Decisions, Hives, and Institutional Design

By Lawrence Solum

Adrian Vermeule (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) and Christian List have posted Independence and Interdependence: Lessons from the Hive on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

There is a substantial class of collective decision problems whose successful solution requires interdependence among decision makers at the agenda-setting stage and independence at the stage of choice. We define this class of problems and describe and apply a search-and-decision mechanism theoretically modeled in the context of honeybees, and identified in earlier empirical work in biology. The honeybees? mechanism has useful implications for mechanism design in human institutions, including courts, legislatures, executive appointments, research and development in firms, and basic research in the sciences. Our paper offers a fresh perspective on the idea of ?biomimicry? in institutional design and raises the possibility of comparative politics across species.

And from the paper:

In particular, after discovering a potential nest site, each scout bee performs a waggle dance whose orientation encodes the site?s location and whose duration encodes her assessment of the site?s quality. The better she perceives the site to be, the longer she dances. At first, the scout bees rely on discovering potential nest sites by chance, but once they observe other scouts dancing, they are more likely to investigate the sites advertised by those others. If they agree with the positive assessment of a site, they join the dance for it. In this way, sites supported by dancing bees are visited and inspected more often than other sites and, if not supported in error, tend to receive even more support. The process leads to a ?consensus? relatively quickly ? in one or two days ? when the support rallies around one popular site; when a critical threshold is reached, the swarm moves there. Crucially, when there are quality differences between different potential nest sites, the bees usually find one of the best ones.

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Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 20, 2010 (boomark / email).