Individuals' timings of decision-making and group performance*

The timing of an individual making a decision depends on the amount of information he/she has. Kurvers et al. showed that informative individuals tend to answer earlier than the others in group decision-making by an experiment, which assumed that each individual in a group can give his/her answer at any timing for a binary choice problem [1]. My interest is whether the pattern observed in individuals' decision timings is associated with the number of individuals who gave the correct answer, called group performance.

I analysed the data in this previous study and quantified the feature of each sequence consisting of individuals' opinion statements, based on its bursty pattern [2]. Burst is the phenomenon where the occurrence of events exhibits great temporal heterogeneity. I found that the stronger is the tendency of burstiness in opinion statements, the higher is the group performance. Furthermore, though sequences of opinion statements are independent of each other, a similarity among bursty trains in them was observed. [1] Kurvers et al., R. Soc. Open Sci., 2015. [2] Karsai et al., Bursty Human Dynamics, 2018.