Related papers: When to Request Evidence?
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
Evidence-based decision-making entails collecting (costly) observations about an underlying phenomenon of interest, and subsequently committing to an (informed) decision on the basis of accumulated evidence. In this setting, active sensing…
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
In this paper, we study belief elicitation about an uncertain future event, where the reports will affect a principal's decision. We study two problems that can arise in this setting: (1) Agents may have an interest in the outcome of the…
Data-based decisionmaking must account for the manipulation of data by agents who are aware of how decisions are being made and want to affect their allocations. We study a framework in which, due to such manipulation, data becomes less…
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…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
Agents, some with a bias, decide between undertaking a risky project and a safe alternative based on information about the project's efficiency. Only a part of that information is verifiable. Unbiased agents want to undertake only efficient…
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…
How does one test empirically the hypothesis that a decision maker (DM) is being influenced by information via Bayesian persuasion? In this paper, I consider a DM whose state-dependent preferences are known to an analyst, who sees the…
We study a repeated information design setting in which the receiver, who is also the decision-maker, updates beliefs in a systematically biased way. More specifically, a distorted posterior in our model can be written as a convex…
Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…
We introduce and study the problem of detecting whether an agent is updating their prior beliefs given new evidence in an optimal way that is Bayesian, or whether they are biased towards their own prior. In our model, biased agents form…
Conflicts of interest often arise between data sources and their users regarding how the users' information needs should be interpreted by the data source. For example, an online product search might be biased towards presenting certain…
This paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…
An implicit expectation of asking users to rate agents, such as an AI decision-aid, is that they will use only relevant information -- ask them about an agent's benevolence, and they should consider whether or not it was kind. Behavioral…
We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…