Stabilizing Role of Uninformed Participants in Collective Decision Making (opens in new tab)

For groups without strict hierarchy, collective decisions often emerge through compromise. We develop a second-order network model of collective decision-making using a dissipative Hamiltonian formulation, in which informed agents introduce preferred directions while uninformed participants contribute only direction-free dissipation. We show that under low conflict, the model admits a locally unique, exponentially stable compromise state. Usin...