Related papers: How fragile are information cascades?

Infinite games with imperfect information are known to be undecidable unless the information flow is severely restricted. One fundamental decidable case occurs when there is a total ordering among players, such that each player has access…

Information asymmetry is a pervasive feature of multi-agent systems, especially evident in economics and social sciences. In these settings, agents tailor their actions based on private information to maximize their rewards. These strategic…

The widespread online misinformation could cause public panic and serious economic damages. The misinformation containment problem aims at limiting the spread of misinformation in online social networks by launching competing campaigns.…

We build a model of information cascades on feed-based networks, taking into account the finite attention span of users, message generation rates and message forwarding rates. Using this model, we study through simulations, the effect of…

Normative models are often used to describe how humans and animals make decisions. These models treat deliberation as the accumulation of uncertain evidence that terminates with a commitment to a choice. When extended to social groups, such…

We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…

Cascades are a classical strategy to enable inference cost to vary adaptively across samples, wherein a sequence of classifiers are invoked in turn. A deferral rule determines whether to invoke the next classifier in the sequence, or to…

Seed fundraising for ventures often takes place by sequentially approaching potential contributors, who make observable decisions. The fundraising succeeds when a target number of investments is reached. Though resembling classic…

In many real world networks agents are initially unsure of each other's qualities and must learn about each other over time via repeated interactions. This paper is the first to provide a methodology for studying the dynamics of such…

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…

To make decisions organisms often accumulate information across multiple timescales. However, most experimental and modeling studies of decision-making focus on sequences of independent trials. On the other hand, natural environments are…

In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…

We consider the problem of detecting an odd process among a group of Poisson point processes, all having the same rate except the odd process. The actual rates of the odd and non-odd processes are unknown to the decision maker. We consider…

We study the problem of an agent continuously faced with the decision of placing or not placing trust in an institution. The agent makes use of Bayesian learning in order to estimate the institution's true trustworthiness and makes the…

We present an anytime algorithm which computes policies for decision problems represented as multi-stage influence diagrams. Our algorithm constructs policies incrementally, starting from a policy which makes no use of the available…

In a network, a local disturbance can propagate and eventually cause a substantial part of the system to fail, in cascade events that are easy to conceptualize but extraordinarily difficult to predict. Here, we develop a statistical…

Directed information and its causally conditioned variations are often used to measure causal influences between random processes. In practice, these quantities must be measured from data. Non-asymptotic error bounds for these estimates are…

Decision makers involved in the management of civil assets and systems usually take actions under constraints imposed by societal regulations. Some of these constraints are related to epistemic quantities, as the probability of failure…

This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…

External or internal shocks may lead to the collapse of a system consisting of many agents. If the shock hits only one agent initially and causes it to fail, this can induce a cascade of failures among neighoring agents. Several critical…