Related papers: Rational Aversion to Information
People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant…
Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand, yet such information is often obtained through intermediaries with biased preferences. Motivated by settings such as testing and recertification in organ transplantation, we…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
Data-based decisionmaking must account for the manipulation of data by agents who are aware of how decisions are being made and want to affect their allocations. We study a framework in which, due to such manipulation, data becomes less…
An agent makes decisions based on multiple sources of information. In isolation, each source is well understood, but their correlation is unknown. We study the agent's robustly optimal strategies -- those that give the best possible…
Rational decision making in its linguistic description means making logical decisions. In essence, a rational agent optimally processes all relevant information to achieve its goal. Rationality has two elements and these are the use of…
A dilemma worth Shakespeare's Hamlet is increasingly haunting companies and security researchers: ``to update or not to update, this is the question``. From the perspective of recommended common practices by software vendors the answer is…
Agents, some with a bias, decide between undertaking a risky project and a safe alternative based on information about the project's efficiency. Only a part of that information is verifiable. Unbiased agents want to undertake only efficient…
The theory of rational choice assumes that when people make decisions they do so in order to maximize their utility. In order to achieve this goal they ought to use all the information available and consider all the choices available to…
Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we employ an axiomatic framework for bounded rational decision-making based on a…
An implicit expectation of asking users to rate agents, such as an AI decision-aid, is that they will use only relevant information -- ask them about an agent's benevolence, and they should consider whether or not it was kind. Behavioral…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information…
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information…
In this paper the theory of flexibly-bounded rationality which is an extension to the theory of bounded rationality is revisited. Rational decision making involves using information which is almost always imperfect and incomplete together…
The proliferation of information disseminated by public/social media has made decision-making highly challenging due to the wide availability of noisy, uncertain, or unverified information. Although the issue of uncertainty in information…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…
When people choose what messages to send to others, they often consider how others will interpret the messages. A sender may expect a receiver to engage in motivated reasoning, leading the receiver to trust good news more than bad news,…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…