Related papers: Value of Information in Social Learning
Surprisal theory posits that the cognitive effort required to comprehend a word is determined by its contextual predictability, quantified as surprisal. Traditionally, surprisal theory treats words as distinct entities, overlooking any…
Given a sequence of random variables ${\bf X}=X_1,X_2,\ldots$ suppose the aim is to maximize one's return by picking a `favorable' $X_i$. Obviously, the expected payoff crucially depends on the information at hand. An optimally informed…
An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
Most positive and unlabeled data is subject to selection biases. The labeled examples can, for example, be selected from the positive set because they are easier to obtain or more obviously positive. This paper investigates how learning can…
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…
We study whether a social planner can improve the efficiency of learning, measured by the expected total welfare loss, in a sequential decision-making environment. Agents arrive in order and each makes a binary action based on their private…
We study the monotonicity of information costs: more informative experiments must be more costly. As criteria for informativeness, we consider the standard information orders introduced by Blackwell (1951, 1953) and Lehmann (1988). We…
In the context of a general semimartingale model of a complete market, we aim at answering the following question: How much is an investor willing to pay for learning some inside information that allows to achieve arbitrage? If such a value…
In the classical herding model, asymptotic learning refers to situations where individuals eventually take the correct action regardless of their private information. Classical results identify classes of information structures for which…
The past few years has witnessed the great success of recommender systems, which can significantly help users find relevant and interesting items for them in the information era. However, a vast class of researches in this area mainly focus…
We study how long-lived, rational agents learn in a social network. In every period, after observing the past actions of his neighbors, each agent receives a private signal, and chooses an action whose payoff depends only on the state.…
We develop a result on expected posteriors for Bayesians with heterogenous priors, dubbed information validates the prior (IVP). Under familiar ordering requirements, Anne expects a (Blackwell) more informative experiment to bring Bob's…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
This work examines a social learning problem, where dispersed agents connected through a network topology interact locally to form their opinions (beliefs) as regards certain hypotheses of interest. These opinions evolve over time, since…
Standard decision frameworks address uncertainty about facts but assume fixed options and values. We extend the Jeffrey-Bolker framework to model refinements in values and prove a value-of-information theorem for axiological refinement. In…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
This work studies the learning abilities of agents sharing partial beliefs over social networks. The agents observe data that could have risen from one of several hypotheses and interact locally to decide whether the observations they are…
Information and uncertainty are closely related and extensively studied concepts in a number of scientific disciplines such as communication theory, probability theory, and statistics. Increasing the information arguably reduces the…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…