Related papers: A Population's Feasible Posterior Beliefs

Bayesian models of group learning are studied in Economics since the 1970s. and more recently in computational linguistics. The models from Economics postulate that agents maximize utility in their communication and actions. The Economics…

We introduce a model of persuasion in which a sender without any commitment power privately gathers information about an unknown state of the world and then chooses what to verifiably disclose to a receiver. The receiver does not know how…

Agents interacting with an incompletely known world need to be able to reason about the effects of their actions, and to gain further information about that world they need to use sensors of some sort. Unfortunately, both the effects of…

We study a Bayesian persuasion game where a sender wants to persuade a receiver to take a binary action, such as purchasing a product. The sender is informed about the (real-valued) state of the world, such as the quality of the product,…

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…

Pimentel et al. (2020) recently analysed probing from an information-theoretic perspective. They argue that probing should be seen as approximating a mutual information. This led to the rather unintuitive conclusion that representations…

Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…

We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents' utilities, the…

Bayes factors for composite hypotheses have difficulty in encoding vague prior knowledge, as improper priors cannot be used and objective priors may be subjectively unreasonable. To address these issues I revisit the posterior Bayes factor,…

We consider the problem of statistical inference on parameters of a target population when auxiliary observations are available from related populations. We propose a flexible empirical Bayes approach that can be applied on top of any…

Persuasion, defined as the act of exploiting an informational advantage in order to effect the decisions of others, is ubiquitous. Indeed, persuasive communication has been estimated to account for almost a third of all economic activity in…

We review common situations in Bayesian latent variable models where the prior distribution that a researcher specifies differs from the prior distribution used during estimation. These situations can arise from the positive definite…

A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we…

We propose a way to construct fiducial distributions for a multidimensional parameter using a step-by-step conditional procedure related to the inferential importance of the components of the parameter. For discrete models, in which the…

People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…

We investigate Bayesian predictive inference for finite population quantities when there are unequal probabilities of selection. Only limited information about the sample design is available; i.e., only the first-order selection…

A sender commits to an experiment to persuade a receiver. Accounting for the sender's experiment-choice incentives, and not presupposing a receiver tie-breaking rule when indifferent, we characterize when the sender's equilibrium payoff is…

There is a long history in game theory on the topic of Bayesian or "rational" learning, in which each player maintains beliefs over a set of alternative behaviours, or types, for the other players. This idea has gained increasing interest…

Bayesian model comparison is often based on the posterior distribution over the set of compared models. This distribution is often observed to concentrate on a single model even when other measures of model fit or forecasting ability…

Prominent opinion formation models such as the one by Friedkin and Johnsen (FJ) concentrate on the effects of peer pressure on public opinions. In practice, opinion formation is also based on information about the state of the world and…