Related papers: Buying Opinions
A forward-looking agent observes signals of a state that follows a Gaussian AR(1) process. He balances the cost of having imprecise beliefs with the cost of acquiring more precise signals. I characterize his optimal information acquisition…
Algorithmic Information Theory has inspired intractable constructions of general intelligence (AGI), and undiscovered tractable approximations are likely feasible. Reinforcement Learning (RL), the dominant paradigm by which an agent might…
We develop a novel framework for costly information acquisition in which a decision-maker learns about an unobserved state by choosing a signal distribution, with the cost of information determined by the distribution of noise in the…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
We study the informational efficiency of a market with a single traded asset. The price initially differs from the fundamental value, about which the agents have noisy private information (which is, on average, correct). A fraction of…
Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
We study finite-state communication games in which the sender's preference is perturbed by random private idiosyncrasies. Persuasion is generically impossible within the class of statistically independent sender/receiver preferences --…
In bipartite matching problems, agents on two sides of a graph want to be paired according to their preferences. The stability of a matching depends on these preferences, which in uncertain environments also reflect agents' beliefs about…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…
I study a moral hazard problem between a principal and multiple agents who experience positive peer effects represented by a (weighted) network. Under the optimal linear contract, the principal provides high-powered incentives to central…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
We study bilateral trade with interdependent values as an informed-principal problem. The mechanism-selection game has multiple equilibria that differ with respect to principal's payoff and trading surplus. We characterize the equilibrium…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
We study the optimal design of relational contracts that incentivize an expert to share specialized knowledge with a novice. While the expert fears that a more knowledgeable novice may later erode his future rents, a third-party principal…
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…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…