The Wisdom of Crowds

This book contributed to the popularization of a counter-intuitive phenomenon, namely, that the aggregation of even incomplete knowledge of a large group of people makes it possible to make forecasts at least as accurate as those of the experts. There are many ways to apply this wisdom of crowds. We contribute every day when we use the Google search engine, whose algorithm integrates our choices to become more precise. The many examples drawn from everyday life, politics and the economy are highly conclusive and convincing. They help readers easily understand the mechanisms underlying the wisdom of crowds and then go on to tackle the nuts and bolts of predictive markets, which are the tool with which this wisdom is collected.