Related papers: Communicating with Anecdotes
When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, we show that echo chambers are a rational…
When collaborating with multiple parties, communicating relevant information is of utmost importance to efficiently completing the tasks at hand. Under active inference, communication can be cast as sharing beliefs between free-energy…
We initiate the study of Bayesian conversations, which model interactive communication between two strategic agents without a mediator. We compare this to communication through a mediator and investigate the settings in which a mediation…
We study an information-structure design problem (a.k.a. persuasion) with a single sender and multiple receivers with actions of a priori unknown types, independently drawn from action-specific marginal distributions. As in the standard…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…
We focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…
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…
In this article, we investigate strategic information transmission over a noisy channel. This problem has been widely investigated in Economics, when the communication channel is perfect. Unlike in Information Theory, both encoder and…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
We study rationally inattentive echo chambers, where players allocate limited attention to biased primary sources and to other players as secondary sources to acquire information about an uncertain state. The resulting Poisson attention…
Epidemiological models increasingly rely on self-reported behavioral data such as vaccination status, mask usage, and social distancing adherence to forecast disease transmission and assess the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions…
Two-player zero-sum repeated games are well understood. Computing the value of such a game is straightforward. Additionally, if the payoffs are dependent on a random state of the game known to one, both, or neither of the players, the…
A sender seeks to persuade a receiver by presenting evidence obtained through a sequence of private experiments. The sender has complete flexibility in his choice of experiments, contingent on the private experimentation history. The sender…
The indoctrination game is a complete-information contest over public opinion. The players exert costly effort to manifest their private opinions in public in order to control the discussion, so that the governing opinion is similar to…
This paper analyzes the information disclosure problems originated in economics through the lens of information theory. Such problems are radically different from the conventional communication paradigms in information theory since they…
Consensus decision-making in social groups strongly depends on communication links that determine to whom individuals send, and from whom they receive, information. Here, we ask how consensus decisions are affected by strategic updating of…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
We introduce a model of sender-receiver stopping games, where the state of the world follows an iid--process throughout the game. At each period, the sender observes the current state, and sends a message to the receiver, suggesting either…
We study a reputational cheap-talk environment in which a judge, who is privately and imperfectly informed about a state, must choose between two speakers of unknown reliability. Exactly one speaker is an expert who perfectly observes the…