CIREQ-McGill Seminar 2019-2020
joint with the Department of Economics, McGill University
Leacock 429 (McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke West)
Organizer : Leonie Baumann (McGill University)
RÉSUMÉ
We often make high stakes choices based on complex information that we have no way to verify. Careful Bayesian reasoning—assessing every reason why a claim could be false or misleading—is not feasible, so we necessarily act on faith: we trust certain sources and treat claims as if they were direct observations of payoff relevant events. This creates a challenge when trusted sources conflict: Practically speaking, is there a principled way to update beliefs in response to contradictory claims? I propose a model of belief formation along with several updating axioms. An impossibility theorem shows there is no obvious best answer, while a representation theorem delineates the boundary of what is possible.
