On first passage time problems in collective decision-making with heterogeneous agents

We study first passage time problems in collective decision-making using the context of two alternative choice tasks. The properties of the first passage time of a high dimensional stochastic process are hard to compute. For a class of stochastic processes governed by coupled linear stochastic differential equations, we develop reduced order models that are amenable to efficient computation of the properties of the first passage time. We use the proposed reduced model to study collective decision-making in heterogeneous cooperative networks and leader-follower networks.