Related papers: Rational Aversion to Information
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…
A Bayesian agent experiences gain-loss utility each period over changes in belief about future consumption ("news utility"), with diminishing sensitivity over the magnitude of news. Diminishing sensitivity induces a preference over news…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
We read newspapers and watch TV every day. There are many issues and many controversies. Since media are free, we can hear arguments from every possible side. How do we decide what is wrong or right? The first condition to accept a message…
Classic mechanism/information design imposes the assumption that agents are fully rational, meaning each of them always selects the action that maximizes her expected utility. Yet many empirical evidence suggests that human decisions may…
Rationality is frequently associated with making the best possible decisions. It's widely acknowledged that humans, as rational beings, have limitations in their decision-making capabilities. Nevertheless, recent advancements in fields,…
We analyze the dynamic tradeoff between generating and disclosing evidence. Agents are tempted to delay investing in a new technology in order to learn from information generated by the experiences of others. This informational free-riding…
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…
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…
Rationality is often related to optimal decision making. Humans are known to be bounded rational agents. However, recent advances in computing, and other scientific and technical fields along with large amount of data have led to a feeling…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in modeling planning with information constraints. Accordingly, an agent maximizes a regularized expected utility known as the free energy, where the regularizer is given by the information…
We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…
An analyst observes an agent take a sequence of actions. The analyst does not have access to the agent's information and ponders whether the observed actions could be justified through a rational Bayesian model with a known utility…
How can we approach the truth in a society? It may depend on various factors. In this paper, using a well-established truth seeking model, we show that the persistent free information flow will bring us to the truth. Here the free…
We study the effect of providing information to agents who queue before a scarce good is distributed at a fixed time. Many information policies reveal "sudden bad news," when agents learn the queue is longer than previously believed. Sudden…
An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…
A sender with state-independent preferences (i.e., transparent motives) privately observes a signal about the state of the world before sending a message to a receiver, who subsequently takes an action. Regardless of whether the receiver…
Patients often avoid medical tests because testing produces not only useful information but also painful beliefs. This paper studies optimal communication between a doctor and an information-avoidant patient who first decides whether to…
The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…
We consider decision-making under incomplete information about an unknown state of nature. We show that a decision problem yields a higher value of information than another, uniformly across information structures, if and only if it is…