Related papers: Belief identification by proxy
The traditional approach to POMDPs is to convert them into fully observed MDPs by considering a belief state as an information state. However, a belief-state based approach requires perfect knowledge of the system dynamics and is therefore…
We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
There is growing empirical evidence that firm heterogeneity is technologically non-neutral. This paper extends Gandhi et al.'s (2020) proxy variable framework for structurally identifying production functions to a more general case when…
Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…
Probability logic has contributed to significant developments in belief types for game-theoretical economics. We present a new probability logic for Harsanyi Type spaces, show its completeness, and prove both a de-nesting property and a…
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…
Neural network approaches in recommender systems have shown remarkable success by representing a large set of items as a learnable vector embedding table. However, infrequent items may suffer from inadequate training opportunities, making…
LLM agents that operate over long context depend on external memory to accumulate knowledge over time. However, existing methods typically store each observation as a single deterministic conclusion (e.g., inferring "API~X failed" from…
Experts in a population hold (a) beliefs over a state (call these state beliefs), as well as (b) beliefs over the distribution of beliefs in the population (call these hypothetical beliefs). If these are generated via updating a common…
Influential beliefs are crucial for our understanding of how people reason about political issues and make political decisions. This research proposes a new method for measuring the influence of political beliefs within larger context of…
In this paper, we consider the problem of social learning, where a group of agents embedded in a social network are interested in learning an underlying state of the world. Agents have incomplete, noisy, and heterogeneous sources of…
We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Agents interacting with an incompletely known world need to be able to reason about the effects of their actions, and to gain further information about that world they need to use sensors of some sort. Unfortunately, both the effects of…
In many scientific domains, including experimentation, researchers rely on measurements of proxy outcomes to achieve faster and more frequent reads, especially when the primary outcome of interest is challenging to measure directly. While…
In the last decade, social planners have used crowdfunding to raise funds for public projects. As these public projects are non-excludable, the beneficiaries may free-ride. Thus, there is a need to design incentive mechanisms for such…
This paper extends the framework of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to multi-agent settings by incorporating the notion of agent models into the state space. Agents maintain beliefs over physical states of the…
Transitive proxy voting (or "liquid democracy") is a novel form of collective decision making, often framed as an attractive hybrid of direct and representative democracy. Although the ideas behind liquid democracy have garnered widespread…
We examine belief filtering as a mechanism for the epistemic control of artificial agents, focusing on the regulation of internal cognitive states represented as linguistic expressions. This mechanism is developed within the Semantic…