arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ludovic Renou.
Deviations from Bayesian updating are traditionally categorized as biases, errors, or fallacies, thus implying their inherent ``sub-optimality.'' We offer a more nuanced view. We demonstrate that, in learning problems with misspecified models, non-Bayesian updating can outperform Bayesian updating.
We explore whether ambiguous communication can be beneficial to the sender in a persuasion problem, when the receiver (and possibly the sender) is ambiguity averse. Our analysis highlights the necessity of using a collection of experiments that form a splitting of an obedient experiment. Some experiments in the collection must be Pareto-ranked in that both players agree on their payoff ranking. If an optimal Bayesian persuasion experiment can be split in this way, then any not-too-ambiguity-averse sender as well as the receiver benefit. There are no benefits when the receiver has only two actions.
This paper compares statistical experiments in discounted problems, ranging from the simplest ones where the state is fixed and the flow of information exogenous to more complex ones, where the decision-maker controls the flow of information or the state changes over time.
A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the time-varying state from the same information and their actions change because of the evolving common belief. The researcher does not observe agents' preferences, the prior, the common information and the stochastic process for the state. We characterize the set of choices that are rationalized by this model and generalize the information environments to allow for private information. We discuss the implications of our results for uncovering discrimination and committee decision making.
This paper generalizes the concept of Bayes correlated equilibrium (Bergemann and Morris, 2016) to multi-stage games. We demonstrate the power of our characterization results by applying them to a number of illustrative examples and applications.
We study a cheap-talk game where two experts first choose what information to acquire and then offer advice to a decision-maker whose actions affect the welfare of all. The experts cannot commit to reporting strategies. Yet, we show that the decision-maker's ability to cross-verify the experts' advice acts as a commitment device for the experts. We prove the existence of an equilibrium, where an expert's equilibrium payoff is equal to what he would obtain if he could commit to truthfully revealing his information.
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of times the agent chooses a particular action, e.g., to work hard. We show that there exists an optimal contract, where the principal stops disclosing information as soon as its most preferred action is a static best reply for the agent or else continues disclosing information until the agent perfectly learns the principal's private information. If the agent perfectly learns the state, he learns it in finite time with probability one; the more patient the agent, the later he learns it.
We consider sender-receiver games, where the sender and the receiver are two distinct nodes in a communication network. Communication between the sender and the receiver is thus indirect. We ask when it is possible to robustly implement the equilibrium outcomes of the direct communication game as equilibrium outcomes of indirect communication games on the network. Robust implementation requires that: (i) the implementation is independent of the preferences of the intermediaries and (ii) the implementation is guaranteed at all histories consistent with unilateral deviations by the intermediaries. Robust implementation of direct communication is possible if and only if either the sender and receiver are directly connected or there exist two disjoint paths between the sender and the receiver.