Polya’s Bees: A Model of Decentralized Decision Making

How do social systems make decisions with no single individual in control? We observe that a variety of natural systems, including colonies of ants and bees and perhaps even neurons in the human brain, make decentralized decisions using common processes involving information search with positive feedback and consensus choice through quorum sensing. We model this process with an urn scheme that runs until hitting a threshold, and we characterize an inher-ent tradeoff between the speed and the accuracy of a decision. The proposed common mechanism provides a robust and effective means by which a decen-tralized system can navigate the speed-accuracy tradeoff and make reasonably good, quick decisions in a variety of environments. Additionally, consensus choice exhibits systemic risk aversion even while individuals are idiosyncrati-cally risk neutral. This too is adaptive. The model illustrates how natural sys-tems make decentralized decisions, illuminating a mechanism that engineers of social and artificial systems could imitate.