I present a model of observational learning with payoff interdependence. Agents, ordered in a sequence, receive private signals about an uncertain state of the world and sample previous actions. Unlike in standard models of observational learning, an agent’s payoff depends both on the state and on the actions of others. Agents want both to learn the state and to anticipate others’ play. As the ...

ion Domain layer Inference layer Task layer Strategy layer Figure 2: Degree of abstraction theoretical view When comparing the layers according to degree of abstraction, the above ordering suggests the idea of Fig. 2. However, the design of the strategy layer is, in practice, tightly bound with the problem domain, and can be viewed as more specific than the inference and task layers. Fig. 3 is ...

Theory-testing occupies a central place within social science, but what kinds of evidence count toward a meaningful test of a causal proposition? We offer two analytic results that have important implications for the relative merits of observational and experimental inquiry. The first result addresses the optimal weight that should be assigned to unbiased experimental research and potentially b...

To support the missions and tasks of mixed robotic/human teams, future robotic systems will need to adapt to the dynamic behavior of both teammates and opponents. One of the basic elements of this adaptation is the ability to exploit both longand short-term temporal data. This adaptation allows robotic systems to predict/anticipate, as well as influence, future behavior for both opponents and t...

Previous work suggests that humans find it difficult to learn the structure of causal systems given observational data alone. We show that structure learning is successful when the causal systems in question are consistent with people’s expectations that causal relationships are deterministic and that each pattern of observations has a single underlying cause. Our data are well explained by a B...

Although it has long been known that psychosocial factors play a crucial role in placebo responses, no attempt has been made to understand if social observation shapes the placebo analgesic effect. To address this question, we compared placebo analgesia induced through social observation (Group 1) with first-hand experience via a typical conditioning procedure (Group 2) and verbal suggestion al...