Fragility of Asymptotic Agreement Under Bayesian Learning
By Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Muhamet Yildiz. 2008
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Under the assumption that individuals know the conditional distributions of signals given the payoff-relevant parameters, existing results conclude that as individuals observe infinitely many signals, their beliefs about the parameters will eventually merge. We first show that these results are fragile when individuals are uncertain about the signal distributions: given any such model, vanishingly small individual uncertainty about the signal distributions can lead to substantial (non-vanishing) differences in asymptotic beliefs. Under a uniform convergence assumption, we then characterize the conditions under which a small amount of uncertainty leads to significant asymptotic disagreement.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1dba4991e5da2a96a4293d68dbb4165fdedb770
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- David H. Autor
- David Dorn
- Gordon H. Hanson
- Kaveh Majlesi
- Larry G. Epstein
- Kyoungwon Seo
- Joshua Schwartzstein
- Daron Acemoglu
In Management Science and Operations Research
- Larry G. Epstein
- Gordon H. Hanson
- David Dorn
- Kyoungwon Seo
- Joshua Schwartzstein
- David H. Autor
- Martin Schneider
- Cosmin L. Ilut
Citations in the corpus
- SELECTIVE ATTENTION AND LEARNING (2014, background): “Recent models by Andreoni and Mylovanov (2012) and Acemoglu et al. (2009) show how heterogeneous prior beliefs or private information can lead to persistent disagreement when, even after infinite observations, public information is insufficiently rich to identify the true underlying state of nature.”
- SYMMETRY OF EVIDENCE WITHOUT EVIDENCE OF SYMMETRY (2010, background): “This is an instance of the identification problem studied by Acemoglu et al. (2009).”
- Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure (2020, background): “While such polarization of beliefs will generally be transient, convergence of the two groups to common posterior beliefs need occur neither quickly nor monotonically (Acemoglu et al., 2015).”