Related papers: Belief Error and Non-Bayesian Social Learning: Exp…
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…
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…
This work examines a social learning problem, where dispersed agents connected through a network topology interact locally to form their opinions (beliefs) as regards certain hypotheses of interest. These opinions evolve over time, since…
As one of the classic models that describe the belief dynamics over social networks, a non-Bayesian social learning model assumes that members in the network possess accurate signal knowledge through the process of Bayesian inference. In…
Order effects occur when judgments about a hypothesis's probability given a sequence of information do not equal the probability of the same hypothesis when the information is reversed. Different experiments have been performed in the…
Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown…
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…
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 paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…
Social learning, a fundamental process through which individuals shape their beliefs and perspectives via observation and interaction with others, is critical for the development of our society and the functioning of social governance.…
This paper studies implications of the consistency conditions among prior, posteriors, and information sets on introspective properties of qualitative belief induced from information sets. The main result reformulates the consistency…
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…
We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
People naturally bring their prior beliefs to bear on how they interpret the new information, yet few formal models exist for accounting for the influence of users' prior beliefs in interactions with data presentations like visualizations.…
Rational belief revision is commonly viewed as being based on a preference order between possible worlds, with the resulting new belief set being those sentences true in all the most preferred models of the incoming new information.…