Related papers: The Wrong Kind of Information
An informed planner wishes to spread information among a group of agents in order to induce efficient coordination -- say the adoption of a new technology with positive externalities. The agents are connected via a social network. The…
An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…
We analyze the dynamic tradeoff between generating and disclosing evidence. Agents are tempted to delay investing in a new technology in order to learn from information generated by the experiences of others. This informational free-riding…
The information ratio offers an approach to assessing the efficacy with which an agent balances between exploration and exploitation. Originally, this was defined to be the ratio between squared expected regret and the mutual information…
We introduce and study the problem of detecting whether an agent is updating their prior beliefs given new evidence in an optimal way that is Bayesian, or whether they are biased towards their own prior. In our model, biased agents form…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
Motivated by online platforms such as job markets, we study an agent choosing from a list of candidates, each with a hidden quality that determines match value. The agent observes only a noisy ranking of the candidates plus a binary signal…
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…
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…
The rule extraction literature contains the notion of a fidelity-accuracy dilemma: when building an interpretable model of a black box function, optimising for fidelity is likely to reduce performance on the underlying task, and vice versa.…
We study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough.…
We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. In a large class of binary-action games, opacity design is just as good as full commitment to actions…
Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…
When people choose what messages to send to others, they often consider how others will interpret the messages. A sender may expect a receiver to engage in motivated reasoning, leading the receiver to trust good news more than bad news,…
Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition should have had…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
We consider information networks whereby multiple biased-information-providers (BIPs), e.g., media outlets/social network users/sensors, share reports of events with rational-information-consumers (RICs). Making the reasonable abstraction…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
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…