Related papers: Waiting for Fake News
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
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…
A well-intentioned principal provides information to a rationally inattentive agent without internalizing the agent's cost of processing information. Whatever information the principal makes available, the agent may choose to ignore some.…
We consider the problem of a principal who needs to elicit the true worth of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The correctness of the information cannot be verified by the principal, so…
We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…
In online markets, agents often learn from other's actions in addition to their private information. Such observational learning can lead to herding or information cascades in which agents eventually ignore their private information and…
A decision-maker periodically acquires information about a changing state, controlling both the timing and content of updates. I characterize optimal policies using a decomposition of the dynamic problem into optimal stopping and static…
In a news recommender system, a reader's preferences change over time. Some preferences drift quite abruptly (short-term preferences), while others change over a longer period of time (long-term preferences). Although the existing news…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…
Incentive design deals with interaction between a principal and an agent where the former can shape the latter's utility through a policy commitment. It is well known that the principal faces an information rent when dealing with an agent…
Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes…
Fake news articles often stir the readers' attention by means of emotional appeals that arouse their feelings. Unlike in short news texts, authors of longer articles can exploit such affective factors to manipulate readers by adding…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…