Almost common priors

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

What happens when priors are not common? We introduce a measure for how far a type space is from having a common prior, which we term prior distance. If a type space has δ prior distance, then for any bet f it cannot be common knowledge that each player expects a positive gain of δ times the sup-norm of f, thus extending no betting results under common priors. Furthermore, as more information is obtained and partitions are refined, the prior distance, and thus the extent of common knowledge disagreement, can only decrease. We derive an upper bound on the number of refinements needed to arrive at a situation in which the knowledge space has a common prior, which depends only on the number of initial partition elements.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)399-410
Number of pages12
JournalInternational Journal of Game Theory
Volume42
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2013
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Agreeing to disagree
  • Common prior
  • Knowledge and beliefs
  • No betting and no trade

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Mathematics (miscellaneous)
  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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