Consensus, communication and knowledge: an extension with bayesian agents

Lucie Ménager (1)

1 EUREQUA - Equipe Universitaire de Recherche en Economie Quantitative

Parikh and Krasucki [1990] showed that pairwise communication of the value of a function f leads to a consensus about the communicated value if the function f is convex. They showed that union consistency of f may not be sufficient to guarantee consensus in any communication protocol. Krasucki [1996] proved that consensus occurs for any union consistent function if the protocol contains no cycle. We show that if agents communicate their optimal action, namely the action that maximizes their expected utility, then consensus obtains in any fair protocol for any action space.

On étend le résultat de Parikh et Krasucki [1990] au cas où l'ensemble des décisions possibles est quelconque. On montre que si les agents sont bayésiens et choisissent à chaque période l'action qui maximise leur espérance d'utilité, alors la communication de bouche à oreille conduit à l'égalité de toutes les décisions.

Mots clés: pairwise communication; common knowledge; consensus

Mots clés: communication de bouche à oreille; connaissance commune; consensus

Domaines: Economies et finances

Lucie Ménager. Consensus, communication and knowledge: an extension with bayesian agents. 2005. ⟨halshs-00194381⟩