Common Priors For Like-Minded Agents

Klaus Nehring

No 35, Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science

Abstract: Two agents are like-minded when their beliefs are equal once conditioned on knowledge of both of their types. Assuming the existence of an outside observer that is commonly known to be likeminded and uninformative about the insiders, we derive the existence of a common prior among the insiders, with the outsiders beliefs (appropriately conditioned) serving as the common prior. A key advantage of like-mindedness is its fully local definition, which allows to distinction between consistency of agent’s actual beliefs and of beliefs they merely view as possible. By later including agents’ “epistemic attitudes” among the primitives, we derive like-mindedness from reasonableness judgments about each others attitudes. In this richer framework, one can model alternative conceptions of intersubjective rationality as constraints on such reasonableness judgements.

Keywords: Common Prior Assumption; Like-Mindedness; Incomplete Information; Intersubjective Rationality; Pluralism; Relativism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2003-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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