Related papers: The Wrong Kind of Information
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
We explore the connection between an agent's decision problem and her ranking of information structures. We find that a finite amount of ordinal data on the agent's ranking of experiments is enough to identify her (finite) set of…
Integrating information gained by observing others via Social Bayesian Learning can be beneficial for an agent's performance, but can also enable population wide information cascades that perpetuate false beliefs through the agent…
In the setting where a group of agents is asked a single subjective multi-choice question (e.g. which one do you prefer? cat or dog?), we are interested in evaluating the quality of the collected feedback. However, the collected statistics…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…
When human agents come together to make decisions, it is often the case that one human agent has more information than the other. This phenomenon is called information asymmetry and this distorts the market. Often if one human agent intends…
Evidence-based decision-making entails collecting (costly) observations about an underlying phenomenon of interest, and subsequently committing to an (informed) decision on the basis of accumulated evidence. In this setting, active sensing…
We study the tradeoff between fundamental risk and time. A time-constrained agent has to solve a problem. She dynamically allocates effort between implementing a risky initial idea and exploring alternatives. Discovering an alternative…
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…
From marketing to politics, exploitation of incomplete information through selective communication of arguments is ubiquitous. In this work, we focus on development of an argumentation-theoretic model for manipulable multi-agent…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
Recent work has considered theoretical models for the behavior of agents with specific behavioral biases: rather than making decisions that optimize a given payoff function, the agent behaves inefficiently because its decisions suffer from…
A planner wants to select one agent out of n agents on the basis of a binary characteristic that is commonly known to all agents but is not observed by the planner. Any pair of agents can either be friends or enemies or impartials of each…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
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…
In many non-cooperative settings, agents often possess useful information that provide an advantage over their opponent(s), but acting on such information too frequently can lead to detection. I develop a simple framework to analyze such a…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…