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research article

Bayesian Decision Making in Groups is Hard

Hazla, Jan  
•
Jadbabaie, Ali
•
Mossel, Elchanan
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March 1, 2021
Operations Research

We study the computations that Bayesian agents undertake when exchanging opinions over a network. The agents act repeatedly on their private information and take myopic actions that maximize their expected utility according to a fully rational posterior belief. We show that such computations are NP-hard for two natural utility functions: one with binary actions and another where agents reveal their posterior beliefs. In fact, we show that distinguishing between posteriors that are concentrated on different states of the world is NP-hard. Therefore, even approximating the Bayesian posterior beliefs is hard. We also describe a natural search algorithm to compute agents' actions, which we call elimination of impossible signals, and show that if the network is transitive, the algorithm can be modified to run in polynomial time.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1287/opre.2020.2000
Web of Science ID

WOS:000631703600015

Author(s)
Hazla, Jan  
Jadbabaie, Ali
Mossel, Elchanan
Rahimian, M. Amin
Date Issued

2021-03-01

Publisher

INFORMS

Published in
Operations Research
Volume

69

Issue

2

Start page

632

End page

654

Subjects

Management

•

Operations Research & Management Science

•

Business & Economics

•

observational learning

•

bayesian decision theory

•

computational complexity

•

group decision making

•

computational social choice

•

inference over graphs

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
MDS1  
Available on Infoscience
May 8, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/177928
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