Related papers: The Perils of Overreaction
The Bayesian persuasion model studies communication between an informed sender and a receiver with a payoff-relevant action, emphasizing the ability of a sender to extract maximal surplus from his informational advantage. In this paper we…
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…
We study the welfare effects of overreaction to information in the form of diagnostic expectations in markets with asymmetric information, and the effect of a simple intervention in the form of a tax or a subsidy. A large enough level of…
Bayesian analyses require that all variable model parameters are given a prior probability distribution. This can pose a challenge for analyses where multiple experiments are combined if these experiments use different parametrisations for…
The choice of priors may become an insoluble problem if priors and Bayes' rule are not seen and accepted in the framework of subjectivism. Therefore, the meaning and the role of subjectivity in science is considered and defended from the…
We study a repeated Principal Agent problem between a long lived Principal and Agent pair in a prior free setting. In our setting, the sequence of realized states of nature may be adversarially chosen, the Agent is non-myopic, and the…
Perceptions of political bias in the media are formed directly, through the independent consumption of the published outputs of a media organization, and indirectly, through observing the collective responses of political allies and…
We consider an adversarial Bayesian signal processing problem involving "us" and an "adversary". The adversary observes our state in noise; updates its posterior distribution of the state and then chooses an action based on this posterior.…
Priors in which a large number of parameters are specified to be independent are dangerous; they make it hard to learn from data. I present a couple of examples from the literature and work through a bit of large sample theory to show what…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
Bayesian persuasion studies how an informed sender should influence beliefs of rational receivers who take decisions through Bayesian updating of a common prior. We focus on the online Bayesian persuasion framework, in which the sender…
Human interactions are influenced by emotions, temperament, and affection, often conflicting with individuals' underlying preferences. Without explicit knowledge of those preferences, judging whether behaviour is appropriate becomes…
Machine unlearning refers to the task of removing a subset of training data, thereby removing its contributions to a trained model. Approximate unlearning are one class of methods for this task which avoid the need to retrain the model from…
We study the computations that Bayesian agents undertake when exchanging opinions over a network. The agents act repeatedly on their private information and take myopic actions that maximize their expected utility according to a fully…
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…
We study a long-run persuasion problem where a long-lived Sender repeatedly interacts with a sequence of short-lived Receivers who may adopt a misspecified model for belief updating. The Sender commits to a stationary information structure,…
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…
An agent must try new behaviors to explore and improve. In high-stakes environments, an agent that violates safety constraints may cause harm and must be taken offline, curtailing any future interaction. Imitating old behavior is safe, but…