People create collective intelligence and make decisions through discussion, conversation, dialogue and debate in organizations and communities in our daily life. This is an autonomous social behavior naturally performed by people as a multi-agent system. It is an important issue in the modern society how to control such a communication field, to optimize knowledge sharing, decision making and learning process in a group. In this paper, we device a research approach called communication-field mechanism design by grasping the phenomena as a control problem of a human social system. In addition, we introduce some pre-existing communication-field mechanisms, such as Bibliobattle and Parliamentary Debate to clarify the notion of communication-field mechanism. We also clarify the relation with the proximity concept such as collective intelligence mechanism, gamification, and mechanism design.

This paper provides a game theoretical framework to analyze speech acts in rules-based communication places such as Parliamentary debates and Bibliobattle. The game consists of two stages:(1) the first stage of deliberation, and (2) the second stage of resolution. In the first stage, players discuss a common topic from various viewpoints, and in the second stage all the participants decide which opinion is plausible following a social choice rule as voting. The theory to examine the game involves dynamic epistemic logic (so-called dynamic game logic), and then enables us to focus on players' epistemic states through speech acts. Furthermore, it is connected to a part of mechanism design in the second stage, and secures players' incentives compatibility in social decisions. As a result, it captures how the rules work and what kind of speeches in speech places are derived through players' strategic thinking with rationality.

This paper analyzes the degree of influence of the presentation order on the voting behavior of participants in the book review game, Bibliobattle, and examines ways to reduce this influence. We collected and analyzed the data of Bibliobattle games that were spontaneously conducted in various places, and this method was applied to research other communication-field mechanism designs. We classified the results of approximately 800 Bibliobattle games collected from the Internet by the order of presentation. Subsequently, we compared the number of Champion Book awards secured by the first and second, and last and last but one in the presentations when compared to others in the presentation order. Consequently, the possibility of the first and second presenters acquiring a Champion Book award has a detrimental effect on the other presenters in the order. Conversely, the possibility of the last and second-last presenters acquiring a Champion Book award is advantageous for the other presenters in the order. We considered the possibility that the response order effect influences voting in the Bibliobattle game. Also, by performing the voting process in the reverse order of the presentation, we examined the way to reduce the influence of the response order effect.

To enable a better discussion, it is necessary to design a better communication mechanism and improve people’s ability to discuss. In this paper, we considered the effect of the tools on the discussion and evaluation of the speech contents as the basis for the mechanism analysis of the communication field for “parliamentary debate”. The feature of the parliamentary debate mechanism is that the rules are clear, so that the flow of discussion becomes clear. In this research, we focused on the basic tools for visualization of discussions, according to this rule. As a result of the significance test, we found that the existence of the tools leads to the arrangement of the remarks. On the other hand, to ensure effective use of the basic tools, it was suggested that understanding and familiarity with them was important. In addition, we found that the number of words and the number of types of those words could be used as an index for objectively evaluating the content of the speaker’s speech.

In this paper, in order to clarify the effect of the number of poles in debate-like communication-field mechanisms, we conducted experiments on the subject of “Kudan-no-Sengen,” which is the activity using drama method to experience direct democratic decision-making. Although “Kudan-no-Sengen” is similar to the debate, which divides participants into two teams, the activity divides participants into four teams, i.e., four poles. In this study, we reformulated “Kudan-no-Sengen” and conducted experiments comparing “Kudan-no-Sengen” with two poles and that with four poles. As a result of experiments, it is revealed that the participants felt more fun and felt that they were able to generate more opinions in the condition with four poles than with two poles. In addition, it is revealed that the participants changed their opinions more in the condition with two poles than with four poles. The design of the number of poles in the discussion is an essential design element in the mechanism design of the communication-field. Discussion in this paper gives important suggestions in all communication-field mechanisms.