scholarly journals Cheap Talk with Multiple Experts and Uncertain Biases

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülen Karakoç

Abstract A decision maker solicits information from two partially informed experts and then makes a choice under uncertainty. The experts can be either moderately or extremely biased relative to the decision maker, which is their private information. I investigate the incentives of the experts to share their private information with the decision maker and analyze the resulting effects on information transmission. I show that it may be optimal to consult a single expert rather than two experts if the decision maker is sufficiently concerned about taking advice from extremely biased experts. In contrast to what may be expected, this result suggests that getting a second opinion may not always be helpful for decision making.

Author(s):  
Ming Li

In this paper, I analyze an example in which two perfectly informed experts advise a decision maker. Each expert has private information about her own bias. I show that consulting two experts is better than consulting just one. I compare the efficiency of information transmission between simultaneous, sequential, and hierarchical forms of communication. I show that simultaneous communication achieves the highest efficiency, followed by sequential and hierarchical communication. However, hierarchical communication, in which a second expert chooses whether to block the first expert's message, achieves a moderate level of efficiency, even though the decision maker receives only one message. Finally, there are preference settings in which both sequential and hierarchical communication are superior to simultaneous communication.


2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRÉDÉRIC KOESSLER ◽  
FRANÇOISE FORGES

We survey selected results on strategic information transmission. We distinguish between "cheap talk" and "persuasion". In the latter model, the informed player's message set depends on his type. As a benchmark, we first assume that the informed player sends a single message to the decision maker. We state characterization results for the sets of equilibrium payoffs, with and without verifiable types. We then show that multistage, bilateral communication enables the players to achieve new equilibrium outcomes, even if types are verifiable. We also propose complete characterizations of the equilibrium payoffs that are achievable with a bounded number of communication rounds.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Panova

Abstract This paper models information transmission in an electoral campaign. The voters have conflicting policy interests, but they are congruent in their desire to elect a competent politician. They hold private information about the candidates for office, and they use endorsements and campaign contributions to signal their information, so as to advertise their most preferred candidates. Endorsements are cheap talk, but campaign contributions are costly, hence, contributions are stronger signals than endorsements. Therefore, contributions help to transmit information when voter interests are relatively divergent (however, not so much that campaigning is useless).


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 558-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam S. Mirian ◽  
Majid Nili Ahmadabadi ◽  
Babak N. Araabi ◽  
Roland R. Siegwart

In this letter, we propose a learning system, active decision fusion learning (ADFL), for active fusion of decisions. Each decision maker, referred to as a local decision maker, provides its suggestion in the form of a probability distribution over all possible decisions. The goal of the system is to learn the active sequential selection of the local decision makers in order to consult with and thus learn the final decision based on the consultations. These two learning tasks are formulated as learning a single sequential decision-making problem in the form of a Markov decision process (MDP), and a continuous reinforcement learning method is employed to solve it. The states of this MDP are decisions of the attended local decision makers, and the actions are either attending to a local decision maker or declaring final decisions. The learning system is punished for each consultation and wrong final decision and rewarded for correct final decisions. This results in minimizing the consultation and decision-making costs through learning a sequential consultation policy where the most informative local decision makers are consulted and the least informative, misleading, and redundant ones are left unattended. An important property of this policy is that it acts locally. This means that the system handles any nonuniformity in the local decision maker's expertise over the state space. This property has been exploited in the design of local experts. ADFL is tested on a set of classification tasks, where it outperforms two well-known classification methods, Adaboost and bagging, as well as three benchmark fusion algorithms: OWA, Borda count, and majority voting. In addition, the effect of local experts design strategy on the performance of ADFL is studied, and some guidelines for the design of local experts are provided. Moreover, evaluating ADFL in some special cases proves that it is able to derive the maximum benefit from the informative local decision makers and to minimize attending to redundant ones.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhang Jinbo

Facing the high degree of uncertainty of the environment, we have evolved two kinds of decision-making styles: context-dependent and context-independent decision. However, the underlying neural basis of these two kinds of decision styles was mostly unknown. Here, the cognitive bias task was applied to split participants into the context-independent decision-maker and context-dependent decision-maker based on the cognitive bias task scores. Then, we used voxel-based morphometry to directly investigate its underlying differences in gray matter volume. We found that the gray matter volume of the prefrontal cortex and parietal regions, such as inferior parietal lobule, was larger in context-dependent decision-makers than that of the context-independent decision-maker.


1989 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 260-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
H J Sutherland ◽  
H A Llewellyn-Thomas ◽  
G A Lockwood ◽  
D L Tritchler ◽  
J E Till

The relationship between cancer patients’ desire for information and their preference for participation in decision making has been examined. Approximately 77% of the 52 patients reported that they had participated in decision making to the extent that they wished, while most of the remaining 23% would have preferred an opportunity to have greater input. Although many of the patients actively sought information, a majority preferred the physician to assume the role of the primary decision maker. Ethically, the disclosure of information has been assumed to be necessary for autonomous decision making. Nevertheless, the results of this study indicate that patients may actively seek information to satisfy an as yet unidentified aspect of psychological autonomy that does not necessarily include participation in decision making.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180027 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pouria Ramazi ◽  
James Riehl ◽  
Ming Cao

To better understand the intriguing mechanisms behind cooperation among decision-making individuals, we study the simple yet appealing use of preplay communication or cheap talk in evolutionary games, when players are able to choose strategies based on whether an opponent sends the same message as they do. So when playing games, in addition to pure cooperation and defection, players have two new strategies in this setting: homophilic (respectively, heterophilic) cooperation which is to cooperate (respectively, defect) only with those who send the same message as they do. We reveal the intrinsic qualities of individuals playing the two strategies and show that under the replicator dynamics, homophilic cooperators engage in a battle of messages and will become dominated by whichever message is the most prevalent at the start, while populations of heterophilic cooperators exhibit a more harmonious behaviour, converging to a state of maximal diversity. Then we take Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) as the base of the cheap-talk game and show that the hostility of heterophilics to individuals with similar messages leaves no possibility for pure cooperators to survive in a population of the two, whereas the one-message dominance of homophilics allows for pure cooperators with the same tag as the dominant homophilics to coexist in the population, demonstrating that homophilics are more cooperative than heterophilics. Finally, we generalize an existing convergence result on population shares associated with weakly dominated strategies to a broadly applicable theorem and complete previous research on PD games with preplay communication by proving that the frequencies of all types of cooperators, i.e. pure, homophilic and heterophilic, converge to zero in the face of defectors. This implies homophily and heterophily cannot facilitate the long-term survival of cooperation in this setting, which urges studying cheap-talk games under other reproduction dynamics.


2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Dmitry Kochin ◽  
Leonas Ustinovičius

The paper presents the ideology of a qualitative approach to decision making ‐ verbal decision analysis. The authors have analyzed existing quantitative approaches and pointed out their main disadvantages. They formulated the requirements for decision‐making methods taking into account these disadvantages: psychological correctness of a dialog with decision maker (DM), strict mathematical proof of the methods and checking of DM information for consistency. The authors present the results of research on psychological correctness of operations of preference elicitation from DM. Several existing verbal decision analysis methods are briefly mentioned.


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