Related papers: Conservative Updating
An analyst observes an agent take a sequence of actions. The analyst does not have access to the agent's information and ponders whether the observed actions could be justified through a rational Bayesian model with a known utility…
We design a double-or-quits game to compare the speed of learning one's specific ability with the speed of rising confidence as the task gets increasingly difficult. We find that people on average learn to be overconfident faster than they…
We investigate opinion dynamics in multi-agent networks when a bias toward one of two possible opinions exists; for example, reflecting a status quo vs a superior alternative. Starting with all agents sharing an initial opinion representing…
A group of experts, for instance climate scientists, is to choose among two policies $f$ and $g$. Consider the following decision rule. If all experts agree that the expected utility of $f$ is higher than the expected utility of $g$, the…
An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…
We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information…
We study a repeated information design setting in which the receiver, who is also the decision-maker, updates beliefs in a systematically biased way. More specifically, a distorted posterior in our model can be written as a convex…
I propose a framework for an agent to change its probabilistic beliefs when a new piece of propositional information $\alpha$ is observed. Traditionally, belief change occurs by either a revision process or by an update process, depending…
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…
Bounded confidence opinion dynamics model the propagation of information in social networks. However in the existing literature, opinions are only viewed as abstract quantities without semantics rather than as part of a decision-making…
A model where agents show discrete behavior regarding their actions, but have continuous opinions that are updated by interacting with other agents is presented. This new updating rule is applied to both the voter and Sznajd models for…
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 study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
We present a behavioral definition of an agent's perceived implication that uniquely identifies a subjective state-space representing her view of a decision problem, and which may differ from the modeler's. By examining belief updating…
This paper proposes a unified theoretical model to identify and test a comprehensive set of probabilistic updating biases within a single framework. The model achieves separate identification by focusing on the updating of belief…
In this paper we formulate the problem of inference under incomplete information in very general terms. This includes modelling the process responsible for the incompleteness, which we call the incompleteness process. We allow the process…
Bias in perceptual decisions comes to pass when the advance knowledge colludes with the current sensory evidence in support of the final choice. The literature on decision making suggests two main hypotheses to account for this kind of…
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…
We study a model of persuasion in which the receiver is a `conservative Bayesian' whose updated belief is a convex combination of the prior and the correct Bayesian posterior. While in the classic Bayesian case providing information…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…