SABIIA - Sistema Aberto e Integrado de Informação em Agricultura (Sabiia)

The survey is concerned with the issue of information transmission from experts to non-experts. Two main approaches to the use of experts can be traced. According to the game-theoretic approach expertise is a case of asymmetric information between the expert, who is the better informed agent, and the non-expert, who is either a decision-maker or an evaluator of the expert’s performance. According to the Bayesian decision-theoretic approach the expert is the agent who announces his probabilistic opinion, and the non-expert has to incorporate that opinion into his beliefs in a consistent way, despite his poor understanding of the expert’s substantive knowledge. The two approaches ground the relationships between experts and non-experts on such different...

Repeated Cheap-Talk Games of Common Interest between a Decision-Maker and an Expert of Unknown Statistical Bias

Palavras-chave: Expert; Information Transmission; Learning; D81; L21.

Ano: 2008

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/36756

Two agents are engaged in a joint activity that yields a common perperiod payoff at two rounds of play. The expert announces the probability that the current state of the world is low, instead of high, at each stage. Having received the report of the expert, the decision-maker takes action at every period according to his posterior beliefs. At the end of each round of play, the true current state is verifiable. The distinctive assumption of the paper is that the decision-maker makes a subjective appraisal of the expert’s reliability: he considers the expert’s true forecasts as the outcomes of an experiment of unknown statistical bias. The paper shows that the expert will have instrumental reputational concerns, related to the future estimate of the...

Non-Uniqueness of Equilibria in One-Shot Games of Strategic Communication

Palavras-chave: Opinion; Expert; Strategic Communication; Financial Economics; D81; D84.

Ano: 2010

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/98437

The paper shows that Perfect Bayesian equilibria need not be unique in the strategic communication game of Crawford and Sobel (1982). First, different equilibrium partitions of the state space can have equal cardinality, despite fixed prior beliefs. Hence, there can be different equilibrium action profiles with the same size. Second, provided a Perfect Bayesian equilibrium exists, different message rules and beliefs can hold in other equilibria inducing the same action profile.

Palavras-chave: Sender-Receiver Games; Strategic Information Transmission; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods; D83.

Ano: 2009

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/50404

Experts and Non-experts

The paper is concerned with the interaction between two agents: an expert, announcing his probability that a particular state of the world will occur, and a non-expert decision-maker, who takes action according to his posterior beliefs. The decision-maker considers the expert an experiment of uncertain reliability and takes the received messages as the outcomes of such an experiment. The model of the expert in the decision-makers mind bears no relation with any measure of the experts actual information. The paper shows that messages will be biased, notwithstanding solidarity between the agents. However, the longer the interaction, the less severe will be the bias.