Related papers: False Cascades and the Cost of Truth

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…

People often learn from other's actions when they make decisions while doing online shopping. This kind of observational learning may lead to information cascades, which means agents might ignore their own signals and follow the 'trend'…

In settings like vaccination registries, individuals act after observing others, and the resulting public records can expose private information. We study privacy-preserving sequential learning, where agents add endogenous noise to their…

We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after…

In social networks, information and influence diffuse among users as cascades. While the importance of studying cascades has been recognized in various applications, it is difficult to observe the complete structure of cascades in practice.…

In online markets, agents often learn from other's actions in addition to their private information. Such observational learning can lead to herding or information cascades in which agents eventually ignore their private information and…

We study how fads emerge under social learning in a changing environment. We consider a simple sequential social learning model where rational agents arrive in order, each acting only once, and the underlying unknown state constantly…

We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…

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…

When considering a specific event, news that accurately reflects the ground truth is deemed as real information, while news that deviates from the ground truth is classified as false information. False information often spreads fast due to…

I study the problem of social learning in a model where agents move sequentially. Each agent receives a private signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions in a neighborhood of individuals, and chooses her…

We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…

We study education as a remedy for misspecified beliefs in a canonical sequential social-learning model. Uneducated agents misinterpret action histories - treating actions as if they were independent signals and, potentially, overstating…

We analyze a sequential decision making model in which decision makers (or, players) take their decisions based on their own private information as well as the actions of previous decision makers. Such decision making processes often lead…

Truth can mislead not because it is false but because delivering it through the wrong channel or authority to an audience with a different epistemic frame can harden misbelief rather than reduce it. Conventional fact checking assumes a…

We consider a cascade network where a sequence of nodes each send a message to their downstream neighbor to enable coordination, the first node having access to an information signal. An adversary also receives all of the communication as…

In this thesis we consider the problem of information hiding in the scenarios of interactive systems, statistical disclosure control, and refinement of specifications. We apply quantitative approaches to information flow in the first two…

Information and individual activities often spread globally through the network of social ties. While social contagion phenomena have been extensively studied within the framework of threshold models, it is common to make an assumption that…

This paper studies how the possibility of strategic misreporting shapes endogenous communication networks. Agents observe noisy private signals about a common state, form costly communication links, exchange private messages with their…

Cascades of information-sharing are a primary mechanism by which content reaches its audience on social media, and an active line of research has studied how such cascades, which form as content is reshared from person to person, develop…