UCL School of Management

Joshua Becker

Lecturer (assistant professor)
Office location
Level 38, 1 Canada Square
Rm NE4

Biography

Joshua Becker received a PhD in Communication from the University in Pennsylvania, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and the Kellogg School of Management.  Prior to graduate school, Joshua worked professionally in mediation and communication training and has completed hundreds of mediation sessions including personal disputes, employer/employee conflict, and decision facilitation.  Joshua currently volunteers as a neighbor mediator in London.

Research

Joshua’s research agenda focuses on “collective intelligence,” or the ways in which group and organizational design impact performance on tasks such as innovation, decision making, and forecasting.  Joshua’s recent research agenda focuses on numeric estimate accuracy in groups aka “the wisdom of crowds” which includes tasks such as forecasting but also hiring decisions, market analyses, and product design. 


Joshua’s research has been published in Science, Management Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Harvard Business Review.  Studying collective intelligence is about how groups can manifest unique properties that cannot be predicted by individual behavior alone, which can sometimes reveal surprisingly counterintuitive results.  For example, Joshua’s identification of the “crowd classification problem” has shown that deliberation in groups can sometimes improve numeric estimate accuracy even while simultaneously decreasing decision accuracy.  

PhD supervisor to: