Victoria Medvec, the Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management and Organizations  Photo © Nathan Mandell

Areas of Focus

Online Democracy

Decision Making Online
The online democracy project attempts to combine theoretical research on political institutions with the design and implementation of software enabling groups to govern themselves online. The software permits groups to use a wide variety of online communication tools — email, news groups, message boards, instant messaging and chat rooms — within an integrated framework for purposes of group decision making. The software also includes voting and proposing mechanisms that allow users to structure their own formal elections and legislative processes entirely online. It has been used in a specifically designed undergraduate class, Online Democracy, for student exercises in MBA classes, for experiments on political institutions and for actual online student groups at Northwestern. The project is a collaboration between Professors Daniel Diermeier and Timothy Feddersen of the Kellogg School’s Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Department, and Northwestern University’s Academic Technology Group.

For further information, please contact Timothy Feddersen.

One of the research applications, in a project by Professors Daniel Diermeier, Victoria Medvec and Roderick Swaab, uses the ayeware software to study multiparty decision making. The research examines the efficiency of multiparty negotiated agreements and team decision making in computer-mediated and face-to-face negotiations. Specifically, the project investigates the influence of the ability to communicate privately and knowledge of the other parties/identities on the negotiated outcomes. One of the papers from this research collaboration, “Communication media and negotiations: Meta-analyses on processes and outcomes” (written by Professors Swaab, Diermeier and Medvec) recently received the Best Paper award at the International Association of Conflict Management (Montreal, Canada, 2006.)