Collective intelligence in science: direct elicitation of diverse information from experts with unknown information structure
This study addresses the challenge of efficiently aggregating dispersed private information from experts regarding complex scientific hypotheses under conditions of no shared context, unknown information structures, and unverifiable ground truth. The authors propose an incentive mechanism that integrates a self-settling virtual-currency prediction market with a real-time chat system, enabling anonymous experts to directly reveal diverse private signals and trade based on hypothesis veracity—without requiring Bayesian inference or predefined information structures. Through incentive-compatible design and an information aggregation algorithm, the mechanism achieves interpretable and efficient information synthesis at equilibrium, offering a novel paradigm for funding and decision support in large-scale collaborative scientific research.