A Dynamic Approach to Collaborative Document Writing (Full Version)

Abstract

We introduce a model for collaborative text aggregation in which an agent community coauthors a document, modeled as an unordered collection of paragraphs, using a dynamic mechanism: agents propose paragraphs and vote on those suggested by others. We formalize the setting and explore its realizations, concentrating on voting mechanisms that aggregate votes into a single, dynamic document. We focus on two desiderata: the eventual stability of the process and its expected social welfare. Following an impossibility result, we describe several aggregation methods and report on agent-based simulations that utilize natural language processing (NLP) and large-language models (LLMs) to model agents and their contexts. Using these simulations, we demonstrate promising results regarding the possibility of rapid convergence to a high social welfare collaborative text.