Limited belief propagation and contingent thinking

Andrew Ellis; Ran Spiegler

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arXiv · 2606.10681

Limited belief propagation and contingent thinking

Andrew Ellis·Ran Spiegler

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Abstract

An agent updates her beliefs over a set of variables after observing some of them. We provide a representation of updated beliefs that captures limited propagation of her observation's implications through the directed acyclic graph that represents the relations between all variables. Failure of contingent thinking occurs when she performs fewer inference steps from unobserved variables than observed ones, leading to correlation neglect and violations of iterated expectations. Our framework offers a new perspective on existing experiments about contingent thinking and suggests new directions. We characterize the model's relationship with familiar Bayesian and non-Bayesian benchmarks, and illustrate it with applications to public-good provision and social learning games.

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Andrew Ellis, Ran Spiegler. 2026-06-09. Limited belief propagation and contingent thinking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10681

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