The recent arxiv draft by Alfonzo and Gonzalo brought to mind some old back-burner thoughts that I wanted to get down on a note. I want to draw on two research problems, one from the distributed control literature and one from the economics literature. Both deal with decision making and information transfer and I think they are both potentially very fruitful for thinking about in the context of animal groups.
Recent work on collective learning has strengthened my belief that there is something important here to uncover.