Author Archives: Cass Sunstein

Here’s my little Bob Dylan story: I took my 15 year old daughter to a Dylan concert a short while ago, and it was wonderful throughout, but the best part was the encore, when he sang Like A Rolling Stone. In the original version, it’s an angry, mean, sneering, contemptuous, and hateful song (great too, of course). Dylan himself described the song with the words “hate” and “revenge.” Thus the chorus: How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone? In the concert the other night, the song… Continue reading →

There’s another form of information aggregation that we haven’t discussed: traditionalism. Conservatives who like traditions often build on the work of Edmund Burke, who emphasized that each of us has a small stock of wisdom, and that traditions embody the wisdom of the many. In this way, there’s a link between Burke on the one hand and Condorcet on the other — and a less direct link between Burke and Hayek. Here’s a passage from Burke’s essay on the French Revolution: “The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which… Continue reading →

First things first: A grateful thanks for the incredibly helpful comments on my ignorant queries about OSS. (More comments on those queries are more than welcome.) The comments prompt the following thought. For OSS, there’s a lot of dispersed knowledge and also creativity, and that’s a big reason for the success. Something similar is true of Wikipedia (though as some people have suggested, the aggregation process is less reliable there). With ordinary product markets, there’s also a lot of dispersed knowledge, both about product performance and about individual tastes. If a watch doesn’t keep time very well, the market will… Continue reading →

On information aggregation, I haven’t yet said anything about open source software (though some comments refer to it). But to an outsider, OSS does exceptionally well in incorporating the ideas of numerous people. It’s analogous to the most optimistic understanding of Wikipedia (yes?). Here are the ridiculously ignorant outsiders’ queries, with apologies for the ignorance: Does OSS do as well as it seems in aggregating dispersed information (and dispersed creativity)? If so, why? If not, why not? It’s hard to have an adequate understanding of how information aggregation can go well, or badly, without having some answers. (I’ve read and… Continue reading →

An empirical note on group polarization and outrage: A few years ago I was involved in a series of experiments (with Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade), trying to figure out why juries (and others) get outraged, and why they end up imposing high or low punitive damage awards. Testing about 1000 jury-eligible people, we found that on a bounded scale (1-6 or 1-8, where 1 means not at all outrageous, or no punishment, and 6 or 8 means extremely outrageous, or severe punishment), Americans agree on the appropriate level of outrage and punishment. At least in personal injuries cases, a… Continue reading →

Here’s a passage from the first entry on Judge Richard Posner’s blog (which he runs with Gary Becker): “Blogging is . . . a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the ‘blogosphere.’ There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and… Continue reading →

In his treatment of democracy, Jurgen Habermas emphasizes the importance and internal morality of deliberation. He thinks that under ideal conditions, “the forceless force of the better argument” will prevail. His account of deliberative democracy lies at the heart of his treatment of constitutional theory. Of course democracy can be seen as a mechanism for aggregating diverse views about both facts and values; and Habermas offers a distinctive account of democracy. But here’s a serious problem. Even under ideal conditions, the better argument may not prevail. Careful experiments have shown that groups often amplify, and do not merely propagate, individual… Continue reading →

Prediction markets, springing up at a rapid rate, provide another way of aggregating private information. Far more Hayekian than simply polling people, these markets have had some terrific success in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections (see the Iowa Electronic Markets) and also in predicting the Oscars and general box office results (see the Hollywood Stock Exchange). For Hayek’s reasons, it’s easy to see why prediction markets might work well. They aggregate private judgments, and dispersed bits of information, in a way that is backed by economic incentives. They have big advantages over the Condorcet method (poll and average) and… Continue reading →

Odd: Some people have objected to my little post about Judge Clement, but apparently its substance was right. People were indeed participating in an informational cascade. Unfortunately, I ended up joining that cascade (tentatively). The confident view that the President had chosen Judge Clement, like the confident view that the Chief Justice was about to retire, was clearly a process in which many people were confidently relying on unreliable people, to the point where the number of (confident) people was misleadingly high. That’s a (bad) cascade. With respect to the confirmation hearings, I predict we’ll see at least one other… Continue reading →

In an extremely short time, everyone seems to have concluded that Judge Edith Brown Clement will be nominated to the Supreme Court. This is clearly an informational cascade, in which almost everyone is responding to the statements of others, who are responding in turn to the statements of others, etc. (Compare the frenzy over the supposedly definite resignation of Chief Justice Rehnquist — also an informational cascade, including many people in high positions in the media and government.) A tentative hunch, though, is that everyone is right on this one. If the President does choose Judge Clement, the most obvious… Continue reading →