Differences of Opinions

Dionissi Aliprantis

No 1604, Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: This paper presents a generalization of the DeGroot learning rule in which social learning can lead to polarization, even for connected networks. I first develop a model of biased assimilation in which the utility an agent receives from past decisions depends on current beliefs when uncertainty is slow to resolve. I use this model to motivate key features of an agent?s optimization problem subject to scarce private information, which forces the agent to extrapolate using social information. Even when the agent extrapolates under ?scientific? assumptions and all individuals in the network process and report their private signals in an unbiased way, the possibility of biased processing or reporting leads agents to process social signals differently depending on the sender. The resulting solution to the agent?s problem is a heterogeneous confidence learning rule that is distinct from bounded confidence learning rules in that the agent may actually move her beliefs away from, and not only discard, signals from untrustworthy senders.

Keywords: Biased Assimilation; Social Learning; Network; DeGroot Learning Rule; Bounded Confidence; Heterogeneous Confidence; Self-Affirmation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2016-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-net and nep-upt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201604 Persistent link
https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/cleve ... -of-opinions-pdf.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1604

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201604

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().