Theoretical Economics

Journal of the Econometric Society

Edited by: Federico Echenique • ISSN (e): 1555-7561 • ISSN (print): 1933-6837

Theoretical Economics: May, 2011, Volume 6, Issue 2

Agreeing to agree

https://doi.org/10.3982/TE578
p. 269-287

Ehud Lehrer, Dov Samet

Aumann has shown that agents who have a common prior cannot
have common knowledge of their posteriors for event $E$ if these
posteriors do not coincide. But given an event $E$, can the agents
have posteriors with a common prior such that it is common
knowledge that the posteriors for $E$ \emph{do} coincide? We show
that a necessary and sufficient condition for this is the
existence of a nonempty \emph{finite} event $F$ with the following
two properties. First, it is common knowledge at $F$ that the
agents cannot tell whether or not $E$ occurred. Second, this still
holds true at $F$, when $F$ itself becomes common knowledge.


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