The Benefit of Additional Opinions

Abstract

In daily decision making, people often solicit one another's opinions in the hope of improving their own judgment. According to both theory and empirical results, integrating even a few opinions is beneficial, with the accuracy gains diminishing as the bias of the judges or the correlation between their opinions increases. Decision makers using intuitive policies for integrating others' opinions rely on a variety of accuracy cues in weighting the opinions they receive. They tend to discount dissenters and to give greater weight to their own opinion than to other people's opinions.