Theories and Technologies of Crowd Decision-Making

Dear Colleagues,

The growth of the Internet has induced a paradigm shift in IT and in computer science, fostering efficient communication and effective collaboration across the globe. A number of new tools are consequently being developed for crowd collaboration. The potential is high for such tools and methodologies to make a huge impact on crowd decision-making. The role of computational agents is particularly important in enhancing crowd collaboration and decision-making, as identified in the successful JP-CREST project “Large-scale Consensus Support Systems based on Agent Technologies''. Smart agents can assist people coming from various ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds to: gather together; share experiences; and reciprocally hone their knowledge and skills.

The aim of this Special Issue, hence, is to discuss agent-based methodologies, tools and relevant formal theories that aid crowd collaboration and decision-making to achieve higher collective intelligence. We invite original, high-quality, scholarly research papers on topics including (but not limited to):

• Technologies and platforms to enhance crowd decision-making.
• Formal theories of crowd decision-making such as formal argumentation, social choice theory, game theory, mechanism design, etc.
• Group decision-making and wisdom of the crowds.
• Collective intelligence and superminds.
• Multiagent systems and distributed AI to support crowds.
• Sociology and social psychology.
• Ethics, law, and social issues on crowd decision-making.
• Other related topics such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, civic science, etc.

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito
Dr. Hadfi Rafik
Dr. Arisaka Ryuta
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• artificial intelligence
• multiagent systems
• argumentation theories
• collective intelligence
• group decision
• game theory
• AI applications