Theoretical Economics

Journal of the Econometric Society

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

Theoretical Economics: Jan, 2016, Volume 11, Issue 1

Fragility of asymptotic agreement under Bayesian learning

https://doi.org/10.3982/TE436
p. 187-225

Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Muhamet Yildiz

Under the assumption that individuals know the conditional distributions of signals given the payoff-relevant parameters, existing results conclude that as individuals observe infinitely many signals, their beliefs about the parameters will eventually merge. We first show that these results are fragile when individuals are uncertain about the signal distributions: given any such model, vanishingly small individual uncertainty about the signal distributions can lead to substantial (non-vanishing) differences in asymptotic beliefs. Under a uniform convergence assumption, we then characterize the conditions under which a small amount of uncertainty leads to significant asymptotic disagreement.


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