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Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) has received much attention in management practice. He vividly describes the phenomenon and highlights some of the potentially underlying mechanisms. A group of average people can–under certain conditions–achieve better results than any individual of the group. This seems to hold even if one member of the group is more intelligent than the rest of the group. Examples are the “Ask the audience” joker in the TV show “Who wants to be a millionaire”, which leads to correct answers in 91% of the cases, or the case of localizing a missing submarine through averaging expert estimations from different disciplines, which lead to more precise results than any individual estimation (for more examples, esp. for IT-enabled examples see also Libert and Spector 2007; Tapscott and Williams 2008). Surowiecki defines various conditions for the successful application of the …