CUNY Researchers Suggest Online Star Ratings are Unreliable, Costly Signaling Theory from Behavioral Ecology of Animal communication May be the Solution
Costly signaling theory from ecology posits that signals will be more honest and thus information will be accurately communicated when signaling carries a nontrivial cost. The study combines this concept from behavioral ecology with methods of computational social science to show how costly signaling can improve crowd wisdom in human, online rating systems. Specifically, they endowed a rating widget with virtual friction to increase the time cost for reporting extreme scores. Continue Reading