Seminar Session: Denis Bonnay

On Thursday, January 26th at 15:00 hrs we will have another session of our seminar: Denis Bonnay (Université Paris Ouest) will present his work on Trust and Bayes (abstract below).

The meeting will take place in room D1.113 in Science Park 904.

Abstract:
How should an agent take into account the probabilistic opinion of other agents in a group? The traditional Bayesian answer would be to use Bayes’ rule and higher-order probabilities. In 80’s, Lehrer and Wagner proposed a different and much simpler model based on the attribution of epistemic weights, which were meant to express degrees of trust. The interest of the model is to allow for a detailed study of the conditions under which agents may reach consensus by repeated updating on each other’s beliefs. However, the absence of a principled justification for their update mechanisms casted on some doubts on the significance of the results. In this talk, I will discuss whether such a justification can be given and prove a representation theorem for Lehrer and Wagner’s updates with respect to Bayesian updates. (Joint work with M. Cozic)