We study social learning in a social network setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the truth. Agents naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The weights are fixed in the sense of representing average frequency and intensity of...

We study the impact of bots on social learning in a social network setting. Regular agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They na¨?vely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. Bots are...

Research has shown that aggregation of independent expert judgments significantly improves the quality of forecasts as compared to individual expert forecasts. This “wisdom of crowds” (WOC) has sparked substantial interest. However, previous studies on strengths and weaknesses of aggregation...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...

We investigate the role of manipulation in a model of opinion formation. Agents repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the social network, can exert effort to manipulate the trust of others, and update their opinions about some common issue by taking weighted averages of neighbors'...

We investigate market selection and bet pricing in a simple Arrow security economy which we show is equivalent to the repeated prediction market models studied in the literature. We derive the condition for long run survival of more than one agent (the crowd) and quantify the information content...

Little is known about perceptions of medical expenditure risks despite their presumed relevance to health insurance demand. This paper reports on a unique elicitation of subjective probabilities of medical expenditures from rural Ethiopians who are offered the opportunity to purchase health...

This paper extends Savage's subjective approach to probability and utility from decision problems under exogenous uncertainty to choice in strategic environments. Interactive uncertainty is modeled both explicitly, using hierarchies of preference relations, the analogue of beliefs hierarchies,...

When confronted with uncertain prospects, people often exhibit both choice deferral and Ellsberg-type ambiguity aversion. This paper obtains a joint representation for these behavioral phenomena. The decision maker as portrayed by my model is willing to choose an uncertain prospect f over g...