Carroll Mechanisms: Opportunities, Challenges, and Agenda

TL;DR

This paper discusses Carroll Mechanisms, a framework for enhancing group decision-making transparency and flexibility, built on market-based foundations, and outlines future research directions.

Contribution

It introduces Carroll Mechanisms as a novel approach for collective sensemaking, combining market principles with transparency incentives, and sets a research agenda.

Findings

Progress in building the theoretical foundation as of Fall 2025

Identification of key open questions and challenges

Proposal of a research plan to address unresolved issues

Abstract

The purpose of Carroll Mechanisms is to facilitate autonomous group sensemaking and reasoned decisionmaking by incentivizing participants to be transparent about their reasoning process, and to empower participants who are known to be capable of changing their minds. We envision Carroll Mechanisms to be built on top of a networked combinatorial LMSR foundation and thus to inherit the desriable properties of market scoring rules and automated market-makers. While we have made great strides during Fall 2025 in building out this foundation, several significant questions remain and several major new questions have arisen as a result of this work. The purpose of this document is to document the theoretical foundation, frame these questions clearly, and propose a research plan to address the questions.