arXiv subjects

Francesco Bilotta

Publications and source records attributed to Francesco Bilotta.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Agreement and Diversity in Interpretation

We study joint decision-making when agents agree on all primitives other than signal likelihoods. We propose a decision-theoretic measure of interpretive disagreement: a pair of subjective models is more agreeable than another if, uniformly across decision problems, it supports a larger set of signal-contingent plans that both agents weakly prefer ex-ante to the common reservation payoff. We show that this measure is prior independent and can be represented as an inclusion preorder over pairs of subjective models: each model in the more agreeable pair is a convex combination of the two models in the less agreeable pair. We then show that the measure's unique rotation-invariant scalar completion is cosine similarity. Applications show that greater agreement reduces speculative-trade wedges, expands a normalized version of the ex-ante Pareto frontier, and enlarges the set of single-model rationalizations. Our order is independent of Blackwell dominance and selects quadratic over KL-type Bregman divergences.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Delegated Information Provision

A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of admissible experiments, but cannot prevent the experimenter from garbling any admissible experiment. We model this situation as delegation over experiments. The optimal delegation set is obtained by comparing maximally informative experiments among those the experimenter has no incentive to garble. When the experimenter's preferences are $S$-shaped, we characterize these experiments as double censorship. Relative to the full-delegation benchmark, double censorship features an intermediate pooling region, inducing a smaller pooling region for the highest states. We show that the designer strictly benefits from imposing a nontrivial delegation set that constrains persuasion while retaining information provision. Applying our results to recommender systems, we show that privacy constraints can arise endogenously to protect consumers against persuasion.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Blameocracy: Causal Rhetoric in Politics

This paper studies the supply and returns of causal rhetoric in politics: politicians' language linking political actions to outcomes through blame and credit. We fine-tune a language model to measure its use in 4.2 million congressional tweets spanning 2012--2023. Causal rhetoric is central to politicians' communication: it accounts for more than one third of tweets, is the language of political disagreement, and rises over time. The political returns of causal rhetoric are concentrated in blame. Combining campaign contributions with quasi-exogenous geographic variation in Twitter adoption, we find that exposure to blame has the largest effects on small donations. Using voting intentions from survey data and an event-study design around blame-only and credit-only days, we find that politicians' support rises in the week after blame-only days. Additional evidence suggests causal rhetoric, and especially blame, can turn complex economic mechanisms into underqualified yet plausible, politically convenient claims.

econ.GN↗