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An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
The ability of a society to make the right decisions on relevant matters relies on its capability to properly aggregate the noisy information spread across the individuals it is made of. In this paper we study the information aggregation…
We study belief revision when information is represented by a set of probability distributions, or general information. General information extends the standard event notion while including qualitative information (A is more likely than B),…
We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…
Non-Bayesian social learning enables multiple agents to conduct networked signal and information processing through observing environmental signals and information aggregating. Traditional non-Bayesian social learning models only consider…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
Social learning refers to the process by which networked strategic agents learn an unknown state of the world by observing private state-related signals as well as other agents' actions. In their classic work, Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private…
We study a social learning model in which agents iteratively update their beliefs about the true state of the world using private signals and the beliefs of other agents in a non-Bayesian manner. Some agents are stubborn, meaning they…
We study a model of information aggregation and social learning recently proposed by Jadbabaie, Sandroni, and Tahbaz-Salehi, in which individual agents try to learn a correct state of the world by iteratively updating their beliefs using…
This work is a technical approach to modeling false information nature, design, belief impact and containment in multi-agent networks. We present a Bayesian mathematical model for source information and viewer's belief, and how the former…
When individuals in a social network learn about an unknown state from private signals and neighbors' actions, the network structure often causes information loss. We consider rational agents and Gaussian signals in the canonical sequential…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
Weighted Updating generalizes Bayesian updating, allowing for biased beliefs by weighting the likelihood function and prior distribution with positive real exponents. I provide a rigorous foundation for the model by showing that…
We analyze a model of learning and belief formation in networks in which agents follow Bayes rule yet they do not recall their history of past observations and cannot reason about how other agents' beliefs are formed. They do so by making…
The DeGroot model of naive social learning assumes that agents only communicate scalar opinions. In practice, agents communicate not only their opinions, but their confidence in such opinions. We propose a model that captures this aspect of…
Bayesian Persuasion is proposed as a tool for social media platforms to combat the spread of misinformation. Since platforms can use machine learning to predict the popularity and misinformation features of to-be-shared posts, and users are…