A Polarization Model for Describing Group Preferences

Abstract

This article develops a model for describing the preferences of a group in terms of its individual members. The model incorporates the empirically observed group-polarization phenomenon. It is interesting that the resulting group preference evaluation is essentially a weighted linear model of individual preferences with the addition of an intercept term. The polarization model is empirically tested in two experimental contexts, faculty-candidate and restaurant selection. For both experimental situations, the polarization model performed better for the majority of groups tested in predicting a holdout sample than did either the more common weighted linear model without an intercept (with weights summing to one) or the multilinear model.