DAVID A. BRAY, Emory University - Department of Decision & Information Analysis
Email: dbray@bus.emory.edu
ROBERT LAUBACHER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Center for Coordination Science (CCS)
Email: rjl@mit.edu
THOMAS W. MALONE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management
Email: malone@mit.edu

This document discusses a few versatile, tool-like crowd performance algorithms necessary for humans to employ internet technologies to make better decisions collectively. This document also readily acknowledges that true collective intelligence approaches are foremost about organizational culture change and encouraging shared group norms (i.e., values) of sharing, openness, transparency, and collaboration. Humans will need to buy-in to the approaches and technology tools for any collective intelligence approach to work. The scope of this document has two sections:

The first section dives into some of the known theory and empirical evidence supporting a case that collective intelligence does, in fact, lead to better decision outcomes - specifically that collective intelligence employing recent advances in internet technologies can provide greater advantages than traditional organizational methods of making decisions.

The second section takes these underpinnings and then extends them to consider a tool and associated crowd performance algorithms that could be coupled into a packaged generic system that serves as a staging ground for an organization to launch collective intelligence efforts. This discussion considers how different features would be aligned with desired human and organizational factors, as well as what outcomes could be expected from such a generic system approach.

ARVIND ASHTA, Burgundy School of Business (ESC Dijon), France - CEREN
Email: aashta@escdijon.com
DJAMCHID ASSADI, Burgundy School of Business - Department of Marketing
Email: dassadi@aup.fr

Microcredit interest costs remain higher than those of commercial banks in spite of significant donor funds, largely owing to transaction costs relative to small loan sizes. With the rise of Web 2.0 and online social interactivity, can these transaction costs be reduced through peer to peer lending? Peer to Peer lending and Web 2.0 have two things in common. The first common denominator is that both of them are rather newcomers in their respective fields and growing fast. The second is that they are both based on mutual and social exchanges between people instead of centrally controlled communications and relationships. The main objective of this paper was to investigate whether they are integrated to support a higher level of social interactions and associations for less (transaction) costs. We find that peer to peer lending consists of diverse websites of microcredit (Kiva, Wokai), social investing (MicroPlace) as well as small loans at market rates (Prosper, Zopa, Lending Club), and even lending between friends and family members (Virgin Money). The paper studies the use of web 2.0 technologies (blogs, interactivity between lenders and buyers, peers' reviews and comments, peers communities and chats) in six such peer-to-peer lending sites. It finds that most of the peer-to-peer lenders are in fact intermediaries between the peers (lender and borrowers) and there is little direct contact between the peers. One website used none of the web 2.0 tools. None of the websites used all the web 2.0 tools. The impact on transaction costs is therefore very little.

DAVID A. BRAY, Emory University - Department of Decision & Information Analysis
Email: dbray@bus.emory.edu
JERRY MECHLING, Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
Email: jerry_mechling@lnwprogram.org
BENN KONSYNSKI, Emory University - Goizueta Business School
Email: Benn_Konsynski@bus.emory.edu
HOLLI SEMETKO, Emory University
Email: holli.semetko@emory.edu

Within the next few pages, we outline how the U.S. President might employ novel arrangements of human and technology elements to produce improved government efforts involving the collective insights of all government works to: (1) better serve the public, (2) protect our country, and (3) generate innovative solutions that both address present day problems and produce a better future for us all. We seek to discuss insights into collective intelligence in large organizations - which, for the most part, has not been discussed with regard to the U.S. government - and translate the themes of these books to improve the Executive Branch.