Related papers: Belief patterns with information processing
A principal delegates choice to an agent whose decision depends on both beliefs and tastes. The principal can steer the delegated decision using two costly instruments: (i) an information policy that determines a Bayes--plausible…
Bayesian persuasion, an extension of cheap-talk communication, involves an informed sender committing to a signaling scheme to influence a receiver's actions. Compared to cheap talk, this sender's commitment enables the receiver to verify…
We study belief revision when information is represented by a set of probability distributions, or general information. General information extends the standard event notion while including qualitative information (A is more likely than B),…
We develop a Bayesian model for decision-making under time pressure with endogenous information acquisition. In our model, the decision maker decides when to observe (costly) information by sampling an underlying continuous-time stochastic…
In this paper, we are concerned with attributing meaning to the results of a Bayesian analysis for a problem which is sufficiently complex that we are unable to assert a precise correspondence between the expert probabilistic judgements of…
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…
In decision problems under incomplete information, actions (identified to payoff vectors indexed by states of nature) and beliefs are naturally paired by bilinear duality. We exploit this duality to analyze the value of information, using…
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…
We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…
Decision tree induction systems are being used for knowledge acquisition in noisy domains. This paper develops a subjective Bayesian interpretation of the task tackled by these systems and the heuristic methods they use. It is argued that…
People naturally bring their prior beliefs to bear on how they interpret the new information, yet few formal models exist for accounting for the influence of users' prior beliefs in interactions with data presentations like visualizations.…
We introduce and analyze the problem of the compilation of decision models from a decision-theoretic perspective. The techniques described allow us to evaluate various configurations of compiled knowledge given the nature of evidential…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
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…
Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…
In this paper, we study axiomatic foundations of Bayesian persuasion, where a principal (i.e., sender) delegates the task of choice making after informing a biased agent (i.e., receiver) about the payoff relevant uncertain state (see, e.g.,…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
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 investigate joint optimization on information acquisition and portfolio selection within a Bayesian adaptive framework. The investor dynamically controls the precision of a private signal and incurs costs while updating her belief about…