Kinetic models of collective decision-making in the presence of equality bias

TL;DR

This paper develops kinetic models to analyze how competence and equality bias influence collective decision-making, revealing that equality bias often causes groups to make suboptimal choices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel kinetic modeling framework incorporating competence and equality bias, advancing understanding of their effects on group decisions.

Findings

Equality bias leads to suboptimal group decisions

Models show competence influences decision accuracy

Numerical simulations confirm bias impacts outcomes

Abstract

We introduce and discuss kinetic models describing the influence of the competence in the evolution of decisions in a multi-agent system. The original exchange mechanism, which is based on the human tendency to compromise and change opinion through self-thinking, is here modified to include the role of the agents' competence. In particular, we take into account the agents' tendency to behave in the same way as if they were as good, or as bad, as their partner: the so-called equality bias. This occurred in a situation where a wide gap separated the competence of group members. We discuss the main properties of the kinetic models and numerically investigate some examples of collective decision under the influence of the equality bias. The results confirm that the equality bias leads the group to suboptimal decisions.