arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Suraj Malladi.
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.
We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn about its quality, or she concludes search to take her best discovery to date. She knows that similar choices have similar qualities and uses this to guide her search. We identify robustly optimal search policies with a simple structure. Search is directional, recall is never invoked, there is a threshold stopping rule, and the policy at each history depends only on a simple index.
We examine how well people learn when information is noisily relayed from person to person; and we study how communication platforms can improve learning without censoring or fact-checking messages. We analyze learning as a function of social network depth (how many times information is relayed) and breadth (the number of relay chains accessed). Noise builds up as depth increases, so learning requires greater breadth. In the presence of mutations (deliberate or random) and transmission failures of messages, we characterize sharp thresholds for breadths above which receivers learn fully and below which they learn nothing. When there is uncertainty about mutation rates, optimizing learning requires either capping depth, or if that is not possible, limiting breadth by capping the number of people to whom someone can forward a message. Limiting breadth cuts the number of messages received but also decreases the fraction originating further from the receiver, and so can increase the signal to noise ratio. Finally, we extend our model to study learning from message survival: e.g., people are more likely to pass messages with one conclusion than another. We find that as depth grows, all learning comes from either the total number of messages received or from the content of received messages, but the learner does not need to pay attention to both.