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arXiv · 2608.18283

The Fragility of Social Learning with Noisy Messages

Matthew O. Jackson·Suraj Malladi·David McAdams
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Abstract

We examine how agents learn when information from original sources only reaches them after noisy relay. A receiver learns if and only if they have access to sufficiently many chains of noisy relay and they perfectly understand the noise process. However, even slight uncertainty over message mutation rates makes learning from long chains impossible, no matter how many independent sources are accessed.

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Matthew O. Jackson, Suraj Malladi, David McAdams. 2026-08-18. The Fragility of Social Learning with Noisy Messages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18283

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