Cass Sunstein on Infotopia, Information and Decision-Making

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2007

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago talks about the ideas in his latest book, Infotopia. What are the best ways to get the information needed to make wise decisions when that information is spread out among an organization's members or a society's citizens? He argues that prediction markets can help both politicians and business leaders make better decisions and discusses the surprising ways they're already being used today. Deliberation, the standard way we often gather information at various kinds of meetings, has some unpleasant biases that hamper its usefulness relative to surveys and incentive-based alternatives.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:13.6	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:18.3	Institution.
0:19.7	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:26.9	find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:31.0	Our email address is mailadicontalk.org.
0:34.7	We'd love to hear from you.
0:38.2	My guest today is Cass Sunstein, the Carl and Lou Wellen Distinguished Service Professor
0:43.0	of jurisprudence in the law school at the University of Chicago.
0:47.0	Today, we're going to talk about his latest book Infotopia.
0:51.2	Cass, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:52.7	Thank you so much.
0:54.1	Infotopia looks at a fundamental problem of decision-making, which is that knowledge
0:58.3	is dispersed.
1:00.0	It's spread out among many people inside our own individual minds.
1:04.9	And the book deals with a question of how can we aggregate that knowledge across people
1:08.7	and sometimes across time?
1:10.6	And the book talks about different ways of aggregating information.
1:13.2	And I thought I'd start off with a nice quote from the book that summarizes the different
1:17.5	methods that you look at.
1:19.7	Here's the quote.
1:20.7	First, groups might use the statistical average of the independent judgments of their members.
	...

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