A Theory of Misperceived Social Preferences and Norms (draft coming soon!)
In many situations, we cannot accurately predict basic statistics about others: what they do, what they prefer, or how they make choices. This paper incorporates various types of misperceptions about others into a framework where agents partially conform to others' actions and/or preferences. First, I characterize the set of stable behaviors and beliefs when agents' conjectures about others' strategies may be incorrect. Stable behaviors are those where agents (i) maximize their perceived utility and (ii) correctly forecast the distribution of actions. Beliefs can drive collective behavior only if agents conform to others' preferences. Additionally, if agents have a minimal understanding of others' strategies, the scope for belief-driven behavior depends on the heterogeneity of perceptions. I extend the framework to include systematic biases in perceiving the distribution of actions. Applications include projection bias or stereotyping.
Presented at CESC (2025), European Meeting of ESA (2024), HEC Economics PhD Conference (2024), Liverpool University (2024), NL in Economics Online Seminar (2024), Annual Meeting of the EPCS (2023), IMPRS-UPF BeSmart Topics Workshop (2023), NoBeC Conference (2022, poster)
Optimal News Bias with External Information (joint with Paul O. Richter)
Individuals are often exposed to information they did not actively seek, such as news shared by others, raising the question of how such information environments shape personal information choices. This paper studies how expectations of external information influence agents’ choices of news bias. Extending a standard model of Bayesian learning from biased sources to account for the anticipation of additional information, we show that expected information critically impacts news bias choices. We characterize the optimal learning strategy depending on the decision maker’s prior belief and the structure of the additional information, offering a novel explanation for why people often consume like-minded media news while also engaging with opposing ones. Applying this to social contexts, we find that highly uncertain agents tend to coordinate on the same news bias, whereas relatively certain individuals may opt for opposing ones. We also shed light on how to foster information acquisition among agents with more extreme beliefs.
Presented at Torino University (2025, scheduled), HEC Paris (2025, scheduled), Séminaire parisien de Théorie des Jeux (2025, scheduled), EEA-ESEM (2024), EWMES (2023), SAEe (2023), University of Zurich (2023), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2023)
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