Probability Reweighting in Social Learning: Optimality and Suboptimality

This work explores sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing in the social learning setup under expertise diversity. We consider a two-agent (say advisor-learner) sequential binary hypothesis test where the learner infers the hypothesis based on the decision of the advisor, a prior private signa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Seo, Daewon, Raman, Ravi Kiran, Varsitiey, Lav R.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Bayes methods
Cultural differences
cumulative prospect theory
Decision making
Error probability
Indexes
sequential binary hypothesis test
social learning
Testing
Zinc
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Summary:This work explores sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing in the social learning setup under expertise diversity. We consider a two-agent (say advisor-learner) sequential binary hypothesis test where the learner infers the hypothesis based on the decision of the advisor, a prior private signal, and individual belief. In addition, the agents have varying expertise, in terms of the noise variance in the private signal. Under such a setting, we first investigate the behavior of optimal agent beliefs and observe that the nature of optimal agents could be inverted depending on expertise levels. We also discuss suboptimality of the Prelec reweighting function under diverse expertise. Next, we consider an advisor selection problem wherein the belief of the learner is fixed and the advisor is to be chosen for a given prior. We characterize the decision region for choosing such an advisor and argue that a learner with beliefs varying from the true prior often ends up selecting a suboptimal advisor.
ISSN:2379-190X
DOI:10.1109/ICASSP.2018.8461681