Deliberation and Epistemic Democracy

We study the effects of deliberation on epistemic social choice, in two settings. In the first setting, the group faces a binary epistemic decision analogous to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. In the second setting, group members have probabilistic beliefs arising from their private information, and the group wants to aggregate these beliefs in a way that makes optimal use of this information. During deliberation, each agent discloses private information to persuade the other agents of her current views. But her views may also evolve over time, as she learns from other agents. This process will improve the performance of the group, but only under certain conditions; these involve the nature of the social decision rule, the group size, and also the presence of neutral agents whom the other agents try to persuade.