Related papers: False Consensus, Information Theory, and Predictio…
A celebrated 1976 theorem of Aumann asserts that honest, rational Bayesian agents with common priors will never "agree to disagree": if their opinions about any topic are common knowledge, then those opinions must be equal. Economists have…
Social learning refers to the process by which networked strategic agents learn an unknown state of the world by observing private state-related signals as well as other agents' actions. In their classic work, Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and…
Bounded confidence opinion dynamics model the propagation of information in social networks. However in the existing literature, opinions are only viewed as abstract quantities without semantics rather than as part of a decision-making…
How does one test empirically the hypothesis that a decision maker (DM) is being influenced by information via Bayesian persuasion? In this paper, I consider a DM whose state-dependent preferences are known to an analyst, who sees the…
In this paper I empirically investigate prediction markets for binary options. Advocates of prediction markets have suggested that asset prices are consistent estimators of the "true" probability of a state of the world being realized. I…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
In the consensus model with bounded confidence, studied by Deffuant et al. (2000), two randomly selected people who differ not too much in their opinion both shift their opinions towards each other. Now we restrict this exchange of…
The counterfactual distribution models the effect of the treatment in the untreated group. While most of the work focuses on the expected values of the treatment effect, one may be interested in the whole counterfactual distribution or…
Mutual information has been successfully adopted in filter feature-selection methods to assess both the relevancy of a subset of features in predicting the target variable and the redundancy with respect to other variables. However,…
An asymmetric information model is introduced for the situation in which there is a small agent who is more susceptible to the flow of information in the market than the general market participant, and who tries to implement strategies…
Graphical models based on conditional independence support concise encodings of the subjective belief of a single agent. A natural question is whether the consensus belief of a group of agents can be represented with equal parsimony. We…
We examine how misinformation spreads in social networks composed of individuals with long-term offline relationships. Especially, we focus on why misinformation persists and diffuses despite being recognized by most as false. In our…
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…
This paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…
In this paper we design information elicitation mechanisms for Bayesian auctions. While in Bayesian mechanism design the distributions of the players' private types are often assumed to be common knowledge, information elicitation considers…
A local culture denotes a commonly shared behaviour within a cluster of firms. Similar to social norms or conventions, it is an emergent feature resulting from the firms' interaction in an economic network. To model these dynamics, we…
Suppose a decision maker wants to predict weather tomorrow by eliciting and aggregating information from crowd. How can the decision maker incentivize the crowds to report their information truthfully? Many truthful peer prediction…
In this paper, we study a model of opinion dynamics in a social network in the presence increasing interpersonal influence, i.e., increasing peer pressure. Each agent in the social network has a distinct social stress function given by a…
We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…
This paper proposes a belief-based framework for social norms in environments where individuals choose a single action. Relaxing the assumption that the appropriateness standard is common knowledge, the framework allows individuals to be…