Related papers: Value of Information in Social Learning

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…

We consider decision-making under incomplete information about an unknown state of nature. We show that a decision problem yields a higher value of information than another, uniformly across information structures, if and only if it is…

In statistical decision theory involving a single decision-maker, an information structure is said to be better than another one if for any cost function involving a hidden state variable and an action variable which is restricted to be…

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 show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…

In social learning environments, agents acquire information from both private signals and the observed actions of predecessors, referred to as history. We define the value of history as the gain in expected payoff from accessing both the…

Welfare maximization in bilateral trade has been extensively studied in recent years. Previous literature obtained incentive-compatible approximation mechanisms only for the private values case. In this paper, we study welfare maximization…

We review the role of information and learning in the stability and optimization of queueing systems. In recent years, techniques from supervised learning, bandit learning and reinforcement learning have been applied to queueing systems…

Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance…

We introduce an information order on experiments based on weighted garbling, a generalization of the standard notion of garbling. In this order, an experiment is more informative than another if the latter is a weighted garbling of the…

We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…

Social learning refers to the process by which networked strategic agents learn an unknown state of the world by observing private state-related signals as well as other agents' actions. In their classic work, Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and…

Analogical reasoning depends fundamentally on the ability to learn and generalize about relations between objects. We develop an approach to relational learning which, given a set of pairs of objects…

Models of social learning feature either binary signals or abstract signal structures often deprived of micro-foundations. Both models are limited when analyzing interim results or performing empirical analysis. We present a method of…

We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…

In designing an intelligent system that must be able to explain its reasoning to a human user, or to provide generalizations that the human user finds reasonable, it may be useful to take into consideration psychological data on what types…

Data plays a central role in advancements in modern artificial intelligence, with high-quality data emerging as a key driver of model performance. This has prompted the development of principled and effective data curation methods in recent…

In classification problems, especially those that categorize data into a large number of classes, the classes often naturally follow a hierarchical structure. That is, some classes are likely to share similar structures and features. Those…

People choose friendships with people similar to themselves, i.e. they sort by resemblence. Economic studies have shown when sorting is optimal and constitute an equilibrium, however, this presumes lack of beneficial spillovers. We…

The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…