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SUMMARY:Social Learning in Decision-Making Groups
DTSTART:20140616T163000
DTSTAMP:20260501T113316Z
UID:29c0f0d7ddaf2f2d37e224abab4df2baab0d42505a4c6ab040c0d98d
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Vivek GOYAL\, Boston University\nPeople have always been influ
 enced by the opinions of their acquaintances.  Increasingly\, through rec
 ommendations and ratings provided on all sorts of goods and services\, peo
 ple are also influenced by the opinions of people that are not even acquai
 ntances.  This ubiquity of the sharing of opinions has intensified the in
 terest is the concept of herding (or informational cascades) introduced in
  1992.  While agents in most previous works have only individualistic goa
 ls\, this talk focuses on social influence among agents in two collaborati
 ve settings.\nWe consider agents that perform Bayesian binary hypothesis t
 esting and\, in addition to their private signals\, observe the decisions 
 of earlier-acting agents.  In the first setting\, each decision has its o
 wn corresponding Bayes risk.  Each agent affects the minimum possible Bay
 es risk for subsequent agents\, so an agent may have a mixed objective inc
 luding her own Bayes risk and the Bayes risks of subsequent agents\; we de
 monstrate her tension between being informative to other agents and being 
 right in her own decisions\, and we show that she is more informative to o
 thers when she is open minded.  In the second setting\, opinions are aggr
 egated by voting\, and all agents aim to minimize the Bayes risk of the te
 am's decision.  We show that social learning is futile when the agents ob
 serve conditionally independent and identically distributed private signal
 s (but not merely conditionally independent private signals) or when the a
 gents require unanimity to make a decision.  Our experiments with human s
 ubjects suggest that when opinions of people with equal qualities of infor
 mation are aggregated by voting\, the ballots should be secret.  They hav
 e also raised questions about rationality and trust.
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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