Related papers: Rational Aversion to Information
Research in combating misinformation reports many negative results: facts may not change minds, especially if they come from sources that are not trusted. Individuals can disregard and justify lies told by trusted sources. This problem is…
In game theory and artificial intelligence, decision making models often involve maximizing expected utility, which does not respect ordinal invariance. In this paper, the author discusses the possibility of preserving ordinal invariance…
When a human receives a prediction or recommended course of action from an intelligent agent, what additional information, beyond the prediction or recommendation itself, does the human require from the agent to decide whether to trust or…
We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…
A resource-constrained system monitors a source of information by requesting a finite number of updates subject to random transmission delays. An a priori fixed update request policy is shown to minimize a polynomial penalty function of the…
Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…
We study the notion of informedness in a client-consultant setting. Using a software simulator, we examine the extent to which it pays off for consultants to provide their clients with advice that is well-informed, or with advice that is…
There is a lively debate in the current literature on epistemology on which type of ignorance may provide a moral excuse. A good candidate is the one in which an agent has never thought about or considered as true a proposition $p$. From a…
Explaining the behaviour of intelligent systems will get increasingly and perhaps intractably challenging as models grow in size and complexity. We may not be able to expect an explanation for every prediction made by a brain-scale model,…
In many non-cooperative settings, agents often possess useful information that provide an advantage over their opponent(s), but acting on such information too frequently can lead to detection. I develop a simple framework to analyze such a…
We consider a decision aggregation problem with two experts who each make a binary recommendation after observing a private signal about an unknown binary world state. An agent, who does not know the joint information structure between…
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…
Algorithmic Information Theory has inspired intractable constructions of general intelligence (AGI), and undiscovered tractable approximations are likely feasible. Reinforcement Learning (RL), the dominant paradigm by which an agent might…
Any agent that is part of the environment it interacts with and has versatile actuators (such as arms and fingers), will in principle have the ability to self-modify -- for example by changing its own source code. As we continue to create…
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…
People are often reluctant to incorporate information produced by algorithms into their decisions, a phenomenon called ``algorithm aversion''. This paper shows how algorithm aversion arises when the choice to follow an algorithm conveys…
A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.
Warning users about misinformation on social media is not a simple usability task. Soft moderation has to balance between debunking falsehoods and avoiding moderation bias while preserving the social media consumption flow. Platforms thus…
The current public sense of anxiety in dealing with disinformation as manifested by so-called fake news is acutely displayed by the reaction to recent events prompted by a belief in conspiracies among certain groups. A model to deal with…
People are often reluctant to sell a house, or shares of stock, below the price at which they originally bought it. While this is generally not consistent with rational utility maximization, it does reflect two strong empirical regularities…