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Diversity, Disagreement, and Information Aggregation
2024.09.18

Topic

Diversity, Disagreement, and Information Aggregation

 

Time:

14:00-15:30, September 18, 2024

 

Venue:

Room 623, Mingde Main Building

 

Speaker:

Cheng Xienan, Postdoctoral Researcher at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University

 

Host:

Zhao Wei, Assistant Professor at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China

 

Abstract

Two imperfectly informed experts are hired to advise a decision maker. The experts are assumed to report their private information truthfully. In this paper we compare the informativeness of different joint (conditional on the true state) distributions of the experts’ private signals, keeping the conditional marginal distribution of each expert’s private signal given and fixed. Our comparisons use Blackwell’s (Blackwell, 1951) notion of informativeness. We interpret “diversity” as an absence of perfect correlation among experts’ signals. Such diversity manifests itself in a positive probability that the experts disagree on which state of the world is more likely the true state. We find that joint distributions in which experts disagree more frequently often have an advantage over distributions in which disagreement is observed rarely. Disagreement may thus be a manifestation of beneficial diversity.

 

Introduction to the speaker

Xienan Cheng is a Thought Leadership Post-doctoral researcher at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His research area is microeconomic theory (in particular, information economics).

 

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