CHAPTER 5
“What Everybody Knows”
Our last group failure may be the most interesting of all. Suppose that group members have a great deal of information—enough to produce the unambiguously right outcome if that information is elicited and properly aggregated. Even if this is so, an obvious problem is that groups will not perform well if they emphasize broadly shared information while neglecting information that is held by one or a few members. Unfortunately, countless studies demonstrate that this regrettable result is highly likely.1
Hidden profiles is the technical term for accurate understandings that groups could, but do not, obtain. Hidden profiles are, in turn, a product of the common-knowledge effect, through which information held by ...
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