The "hard-easy effect" is a well-known cognitive bias on self-confidence calibration that refers to a tendency to overestimate the probability of success in hard-perceived tasks, and to underestimate it in easy-perceived tasks. This paper provides a target-based foundation for this effect, and...

We study a model of team problem-solving over a large solution space. Compared to the existing literature, we allow for heterogeneity both in the organizational architectures and in the agents' cognitive abilities; moreover, we introduce a more expressive performance measure. We find a robust...

Two agents endowed with different individual conceptual spaces are engaged in a dialectic process to reach a common understanding. We model the process as a simple noncooperative game and demonstrate three results. When the initial disagreement is focused, the bargaining process has a zero-sum...

This paper revisits a recent study by Posen and Levinthal (2012) on the exploration/exploitation tradeoff for a multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward probabilities undergo random shocks. We show that their analysis suffers two shortcomings: it assumes that learning is based on stale...

We consider a team of agents with limited problem-solving ability facing a disjunctive task over a large solution space. We provide sufficient conditions for the following four statements. First, two heads are better than one: a team of two agents will solve the problem even if neither agent...

We study a general preferential attachment and Pólya's urn model. At each step a new vertex is introduced, which can be connected to at most one existing vertex. If it is disconnected, it becomes a pioneer vertex. Given that it is not disconnected, it joins an existing pioneer vertex with...

We study the probability that two or more agents can attain common knowledge of nontrivial events when the size of the state space grows large. We adopt the standard epistemic model where the knowledge of an agent is represented by a partition of the state space. Each agent is endowed with a...

We study the evolution of trading strategies in double auctions as the size of the market gets larger. When the number of buyers and sellers is balanced, Fano et al. (2011) show that the choice of the order-clearing rule (simultaneous or asynchronous) steers the emergence of fundamentally...