DIMENSIONALITY AND DISAGREEMENT: ASYMPTOTIC BELIEF DIVERGENCE IN RESPONSE TO COMMON INFORMATION

We provide a model of boundedly rational, multidimensional learning and characterize when beliefs will converge to the truth. Agents maintain beliefs as marginal probabilities instead of joint probabilities, and agents' information is of lower dimension than the model. As a result, for some obs...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Loh, I. (Author), Phelan, G. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Blackwell Publishing Inc. 2019
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
Description
Summary:We provide a model of boundedly rational, multidimensional learning and characterize when beliefs will converge to the truth. Agents maintain beliefs as marginal probabilities instead of joint probabilities, and agents' information is of lower dimension than the model. As a result, for some observations, agents may face an identification problem affecting the role of data in inference. Beliefs converge to the truth when these observations are rare, but beliefs diverge when observations presenting an identification problem are frequent. Robustly, two agents with differing priors who observe identical, unambiguous information may disagree forever, with stronger disagreement the more information received. © (2019) by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association
ISBN:00206598 (ISSN)
DOI:10.1111/iere.12406