Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics -
Miscellaneous, University of applied sciences, Nürnberg, language:
English, abstract: If candidates in the TV show "Who wants to be a
Millionaire?" no longer know what to do, they often seek help at the
phone joker. In the supposed experts, most players see the best
advisers. But only in 54 percent of cases the responses of the phone
joker is correct. This is still more than a 50:50 joker. However the
much better choice is the audience joker. This joker has an average
success rate of about 90 percent regardless of the time of its use.
Therefore it is the best joker of all by using the collective
distributed knowledge of people. That demonstrates that the
participation of the crowd usually leads to a better result because the
average of many independent judgments is often very close to the truth.
Several years ago the sociologist James Surowiecki described this
phenomenon in his international bestseller "The Wisdom of the Crowds"
and demonstrated with many examples that a group can find better
solutions and make more intelligent decisions than individuals. He
justified this on one hand with the fact that individuals are often
guided by feelings, on the other hand that they have limited information
and consequently only a limited view. Because of self-organizing,
statistical effects (e.g. law of large numbers) and the fact that the
crowd is not limited to bureaucracy, administration, time or location
the crowd can surpass every individual expert. Crowdsourcing, the next
step in the evolution of outsourcing can activate the wisdom of the
crowd by using the collective intelligence of a large number of
individuals from cognitively diverse perspectives. For instance the
web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia, the web browser Firefox or the
operating system Linux rely on the participation and collective
knowledge of the crowd. On Wikipedia any internet user can write, use,
edit and distribute articles fre
