Motivated by the difficulty of effecting fundamental change in the architecture of the Internet, in this paper, we study from a theoretical perspective the question of how individuals can join forces toward collective ventures. To that end, we draw on an elementary concept in Internet systems engineering, namely, that of incremental deployability, which we study mathematically and computationally. For example, we show that incremental deployability is at least as general a concept as the Nash equilibrium (in that the latter can be derived from the former). We then draw on this foundation to design and analyze institutional mechanisms that are not only promising to bootstrap emerging Internet architectures but they also have broader applications in social organization beyond its predominant market (and finance)-based character.
Related to the problem of diffusing innovation is that of inciting collective action (in the sense that the decision to act in a particular fashion diffuses in a social system) a problem whose study was initiated in the seminal work of @cite_14 . The study of collective action was later taken up by several authors such as, for example, in the form of critical mass theories (bearing relevance to nuclear fission explosions in physics) . @cite_35 motivates the study of collective action in settings bearing a political nature related to citizen oppression in rogue states, however, models of collective action range from crowdsourcing in the Internet to enabling countermeasures against climate change (such as controlling carbon emissions). Although various authors discuss the problem of inciting collective action through incentives mechanisms, the idea of creating institutions to that effect (as we do in this paper) and proving their efficacy has not, to the extent of our knowledge, been considered before by these earlier works. (An exception is where the analysis is at an elementary stage.)
@cite_35 @cite_14
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Collective action usually depends on a "critical mass" that behaves differently from typical group members. Sometimes the critical mass provides some level of the good for others who do nothing, while at other times the critical mass pays the start-up costs and induces widespread collective action. Formal analysis supplemented by simulations shows that the first scenario is most likely when the production function relating inputs of resource contributions to outputs of a collective good is decelerating (characterized by diminishing marginal returns), whereas the second scenario is most likely when the production function is accelerating (characterized by increasing marginal returns). Decelerating production functions yield either surpluses of contributors or order effects in which contributions are maximized if the least interested contribute first, thus generating strategic gaming and competition among potential contributors. The start-up costs in accelerating production functions create severe feasibili... Collective intelligence is believed to underly the remarkable success of human society. The formation of accurate shared beliefs is one of the key components of human collective intelligence. How are accurate shared beliefs formed in groups of fallible individuals? Answering this question requires a multiscale analysis. We must understand both the individual decision mechanisms people use, and the properties and dynamics of those mechanisms in the aggregate. As of yet, mathematical tools for such an approach have been lacking. To address this gap, we introduce a new analytical framework: We propose that groups arrive at accurate shared beliefs via distributed Bayesian inference. Distributed inference occurs through information processing at the individual level, and yields rational belief formation at the group level. We instantiate this framework in a new model of human social decision-making, which we validate using a dataset we collected of over 50,000 users of an online social trading platform where investors mimic each others' trades using real money in foreign exchange and other asset markets. We find that in this setting people use a decision mechanism in which popularity is treated as a prior distribution for which decisions are best to make. This mechanism is boundedly rational at the individual level, but we prove that in the aggregate implements a type of approximate "Thompson sampling"---a well-known and highly effective single-agent Bayesian machine learning algorithm for sequential decision-making. The perspective of distributed Bayesian inference therefore reveals how collective rationality emerges from the boundedly rational decision mechanisms people use. By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can help such publics take action. Much of the dissatisfaction with Professor Arrow's formulation (1963) of the problem of social choice rests on Arrow's imposition of the controversial "independence of irrelevant alternatives" condition (A3). Arrow himself has ceased to insist upon this condition in its strong original form (Arrow 1967). The chief objection to A3 is that it prevents the collectivechoice rule from responding to intensity of individual preference, making the choice rule unacceptable on a priori grounds (Kemp and Asimakopulos 1952; Hildreth 1953; Coleman 1966; Quirk and Saposnik 1968; Sen 1970). This view is not correct if intensity of preference is measured by an ability to make side payments in order to influence collective decision making. I show that a modified version of A3 which takes explicit account of intensity of preference actually implies the original independence condition for realistic environment sets. This will be true no matter how side payments of private goods and services are evaluated. A modest amount of notation is required before the independence condition can be given formal expression. The set X, the nonnegative orthant of m-dimensional Euclidean space, is the space of hypothetical states of the economy. There are n individuals whose preferences are to be considered by any collective decision-making process, and to each individual i there corresponds a binary relation Ri which is complete on X. The term