Related papers: Learning about informativeness
Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…
Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…
We study sequential social learning with continuous actions and conformity when agents can endogenously generate hard, publicly verifiable evidence. Actions transmit soft information whose visibility depends on responsiveness to private…
We consider decision problems under uncertainty where the options available to a decision maker and the resulting outcome are related through a causal mechanism which is unknown to the decision maker. We ask how a decision maker can learn…
Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework for distributed inference of a group of agents interacting over a social network by sequentially communicating and updating beliefs about the unknown state of the world through…
As one of the classic models that describe the belief dynamics over social networks, a non-Bayesian social learning model assumes that members in the network possess accurate signal knowledge through the process of Bayesian inference. In…
It is well known that sequential decision making may lead to information cascades. That is, when agents make decisions based on their private information, as well as observing the actions of those before them, then it might be rational to…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
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.…
We study learning on social media with an equilibrium model of users interacting with shared news stories. Rational users arrive sequentially, observe an original story (i.e., a private signal) and a sample of predecessors' stories in a…
This work studies sequential social learning (also known as Bayesian observational learning), and how private communication can enable agents to avoid herding to the wrong action/state. Starting from the seminal BHW (Bikhchandani,…
We design a double-or-quits game to compare the speed of learning one's specific ability with the speed of rising confidence as the task gets increasingly difficult. We find that people on average learn to be overconfident faster than they…
In this study, I present a theoretical social learning model to investigate how confirmation bias affects opinions when agents exchange information over a social network. Hence, besides exchanging opinions with friends, agents observe a…
This paper analyzes a dynamic interaction between a fully rational, privately informed sender and a boundedly rational, uninformed receiver with memory constraints. The sender controls the flow of information, while the receiver designs a…
Traditional economic models typically treat private information, or signals, as generated from some underlying state. Recent work has explicated alternative models, where signals correspond to interpretations of available information. We…
This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to…
Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionization". Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Social learning is defined as the ability of a population to aggregate information, a process which must crucially depend on the mechanisms of social interaction. Consumers choosing which product to buy, or voters deciding which option to…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…