Leveraging Large Language Models for Collective Decision-Making

Abstract: In various work contexts, such as meeting scheduling, collaborating, and project planning, collective decision-making is essential but often challenging due to diverse individual preferences, varying work focuses, and power dynamics among members. To address this, we propose a system leveraging LLMs to facilitate group decision-making by managing conversations and balancing preferences among individuals. Our system aims to extract individual preferences from each member's conversation with the system and suggest options that satisfy the preferences of the members. We specifically apply this system to corporate meeting scheduling. We create synthetic employee profiles and simulate conversations at scale, leveraging LLMs to evaluate the system performance as a novel approach to conducting a user study. Our results indicate efficient coordination with reduced interactions between the members and the LLM-based system. The system refines and improves its proposed options over time, ensuring that many of the members' individual preferences are satisfied in an equitable way. Finally, we conduct a survey study involving human participants to assess our system's ability to aggregate preferences and reasoning about them. Our findings show that the system exhibits strong performance in both dimensions.