Bayesian Evidence Accumulation on Social Networks

Abstract: To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans use to do so it is useful to compare them to observers that optimally integrate all evidence. Here we derive network models of rational (Bayes optimal) agents who accumulate private measurements and observe decisions of their neighbors to make an irreversible choice between two options. The resulting information exchange dynamics has interesting properties: When one option is preferred, the absence of a decision can be increasingly informative over time. In recurrent networks an absence of a decision can lead to a sequence of belief updates akin to those in the literature on common knowledge. Information obtained from observing repeated non-decisions is independent of realization, unless the private information of agents is redundant. On the other hand, in larger networks a single decision can trigger a cascade of agreements and disagreements that depend on the private information agents have gathered. Our approach provides a bridge between social decision making models in the economics literature, which largely ignore the temporal dynamics of decisions, and the single-observer evidence accumulator models used widely in neuroscience and psychology.