• DocumentCode
    574683
  • Title

    On consensus and exponentially fast social learning

  • Author

    Molavi, Pooya ; Rad, K.R. ; Tahbaz-Salehi, A. ; Jadbabaie, A.

  • Author_Institution
    Dept. of Electr. & Syst. Eng., Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
  • fYear
    2012
  • fDate
    27-29 June 2012
  • Firstpage
    2165
  • Lastpage
    2170
  • Abstract
    We analyze a model of social learning in which agents desire to identify an unknown state of the world using both their private observations and information they obtain when communicating with agents in their social neighborhood. Every agent holds a belief that represents her opinion on how likely it is for each of several possible states to be the true one. At each time period, agents receive private signals, and also observe the beliefs of their neighbors in a social network. They then update their beliefs by integrating the information available to them in a boundedly rational fashion. We show that in spite of agents´ making new private observations perpetually and the myopic and local updating rule employed by them, agents will eventually reach consensus in their beliefs. This is proved by first showing that agents´ beliefs over any state whose truth is inconsistent with their collective observations go to zero exponentially fast.
  • Keywords
    learning (artificial intelligence); social networking (online); information availability; private observations; private signals; rational fashion; social learning; social neighborhood; social network; Bayesian methods; Convergence; Educational institutions; Probability distribution; Silicon; Social network services; Vectors;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    American Control Conference (ACC), 2012
  • Conference_Location
    Montreal, QC
  • ISSN
    0743-1619
  • Print_ISBN
    978-1-4577-1095-7
  • Electronic_ISBN
    0743-1619
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/ACC.2012.6315271
  • Filename
    6315271