Working Paper Series PUBLIC DISAGREEMENT (original) (raw)
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Information Sampling, Conformity and Collective Mistaken Beliefs
Societies sometimes stick to the status quo instead of switching to superior technologies and institutions. Existing explanations often attribute this to a coordination failure due to payoff externalities: people may know that another alternative is superior but nobody has an incentive to switch unless many others do so. We show that a simple learning argument can provide an alternative explanation. When people learn about the alternatives from their own experiences but tend to adopt the behaviors of others, they will mistakenly learn to believe that a popular alternative is superior to a better, but unpopular alternative. Our model neither assumes that agents engage in motivated cognition nor that they transmit mistaken information to others. Rather, it emphasizes the role of a fundamental asymmetry in access to information about popular versus unpopular alternatives. Our model thus provides a novel, sampling-based, explanation of how conformity in behavior can lead to private acce...
Ignorance and bias in collective decisions
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016
We study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests. Committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best, but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule. In the experiment, as predicted by Bayesian equilibrium, voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule, and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule. As opposed to Bayesian equilibrium predictions, however, many committee members vote when uninformed. Moreover, uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information. We show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena, and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases.
Ignorance and Bias in Collective DECISIONS1
2014
We study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests. Committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best, but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule. In the experiment, as predicted by Bayesian equilibrium, voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule, and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule. As opposed to Bayesian equilibrium predictions, however, many committee members vote when uninformed. Moreover, uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information. We show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena, and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases.
Journal of Economic Theory, 2010
We calculate learning rates when agents are informed through both public and private observation of other agents' actions. We provide an explicit solution for the evolution of the distribution of posterior beliefs. When the private learning channel is present, we show that convergence of the distribution of beliefs to the perfect-information limit is exponential at a rate equal to the sum of the mean arrival rate of public information and the mean rate at which individual agents are randomly matched with other agents. If, however, there is no private information sharing, then convergence is exponential at a rate strictly lower than the mean arrival rate of public information.
Ignorance and Bias in Collective Decision
2014
We study theoretically and experimentally a committee with common interests. Committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best, but each member can acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule. In the experiment, as predicted by Bayesian equilibrium, voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule, and attempt to counter the bias in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule. As opposed to Bayesian equilibrium predictions, however, many committee members vote when uninformed. Moreover, uninformed voting is strongly associated with a lower propensity to acquire information. We show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs can account for both these phenomena, and provides a good overall fit to the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases.
Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions
In real societies individuals are constantly subject to external stimuli, such as peer and media pressure, which often have a substantial impact on the formation of their opinions. Normally, in a social system, each agent interacts with other agents on different topics, such as politics, religion, economy, and is subject to the pressure of exogenous forces, including mass media. As a result, its public profile is a non-trivial combination of its opinions on several different aspects. While often trying to mould its own ideas according to the combined effects of social and media pressure, each agent also identifies meaningful relationships among its opinions on different subjects, and naturally aims at building a coherent cultural profile. Here we propose a simple model in which coherent agents, interacting on several layers representing different topics, tend to spread their own ideas to their neighbourhoods, and are at the same time subject to external fields which play the role of...
Ignorance and bias in collective decision:Theory and experiments
2014
We consider a committee with common interests. Committee members do not know which of two alternatives is the best, but each member may acquire privately a costly signal before casting a vote under either majority or unanimity rule. In the lab, as predicted by Bayesian equilibrium, voters are more likely to acquire information under majority rule, and attempt to counter the bias built in favor of one alternative under unanimity rule. As opposed to Bayesian equilibrium predictions, however, some committee members vote for either alternative when uninformed. Moreover, uninformed voting is correlated with a lower disposition to acquire information. We show that an equilibrium model of subjective prior beliefs may account for this correlation, and provides a good fit for the observed patterns of behavior both in terms of rational ignorance and biases.
False Consensus, Information Theory, and Prediction Markets
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private information is independent conditioning on the event's outcome whenever agents have similar beliefs about the outcome, their information is aggregated. That is, there is no false consensus. Our main result has a short proof based on a natural information theoretic framework. A key ingredient of the framework is the equivalence between the sign of the "interaction information" and a super/sub-additive property of the value of people's information. This provides an intuitive interpretation and an interesting application of the interaction information, which measures the amount of information shared by three random variables. We illustrate the power of this information theoretic framework by reproving two additional results within it: 1) that agents quickly agree when announcing (summaries of) beliefs in round robin fashion [Aaronson 2005]; and 2) results from [Chen et al 2010] on when prediction market agents should release information to maximize their payment. We also interpret the information theoretic framework and the above results in prediction markets by proving that the expected reward of revealing information is the conditional mutual information of the information revealed.
Modeling How False Beliefs Spread
Effective political decision making, like other decision making, requires decision-makers to have accurate beliefs about the domain in which they are acting. In democratic societies, this often means that accurate beliefs must be held by a community, or at least a significant portion of a community, of voters. Voters are tasked with scrutinizing candidates and possible policy proposals and, considering their own experiences, interests, goals, knowledge, and values, with deciding which of various ballot measures is most likely to bring about their desired outcomes.