Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Abstract: We study the set of possible joint posterior belief distributions of a group of agents who share a common prior regarding a binary state and who observe some information structure. Our main result is that, for the two-agent case, a quantitative version of Aumann's Agreement Theorem provides a necessary and sufficient condition for feasibility. For any number of agents, a related "no trade" condition likewise provides a characterization of feasibility. We use our characterization to construct joint belief distributions in which agents are informed regarding the state, and yet receive no information regarding the other's posterior. We study a related class of Bayesian persuasion problems with a single sender and multiple receivers, and explore the extreme points of the set of feasible distributions.

Written with Itai Arieli, Yakov Babichenko, and Fedor Sandomirskiy. Tamuz will be joined by guests Doron Ravid, Ben Brooks, and Elliot Lipnowski.

How to view the seminar:
Sign up for a free twitch.tv account, and tune in on Wednesdays at noon pacific time on twitch.tv/caltechecontheory. You will be able to ask questions on the twitch chat.