Belief Updating without Complete Trust

Jawwad Noor and Yuzhao Yang

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Abstract: We represent a non-Bayesian agent as one who does not completely trust the information they receive. The behavioral expression of complete trust lies in a homogeneity property of Bayesian updating: posterior beliefs do not change if a signal is made arbitrarily rare by scaling down its likelihood vector. We show that simply dropping this property and retaining all other Bayesian behavioral properties yields a unique representation where the agent is still Bayesian but has subjective uncertainty over the information structure generating the signal. The representation result is proved using the Fundamental Theorem of Projective Geometry. We analyze how various updating biases may be rationalized by a lack of trust.

Date: 2026-09
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