Scientific models structure our perception of reality. This paper studies how we choose among them under expert advice. Scientific models are formalised as probability distributions over possible scenarios. An expert is assumed to know the most likely model and seeks to communicate it to a decision maker, but cannot prove it. As a result, communication about models is a cheap talk game. The decision maker is in a situation of model-uncertainty and is ambiguity sensitive. I show that information transmission depends on the strategic misalignment of players and, unlike similar models in the literature, a form of consensus among scientific models. When science is divided, there is an asymmetry in information transmission when the receiver has maxmin expected utility preferences. No information can be conveyed about models above a certain threshold. All equilibria of the game are outcome equivalent to a partitional equilibrium and the most informative one is interim Pareto dominant. 

Despite years of scientific reporting regarding climate change, public acceptance of economic regulations is still limited. Why scientific forecasts regarding climate change fail to trigger public willingness for the appropriate mitigation is still a highly debated question. This paper surveys the economic literature on environmental information transmission in search of an explanatory mechanism for this paradox. Combining empirical results with existing theoretical mechanisms, I argue that failure in information transmission naturally arises from the strategic setting in which scientific authorities and citizens find themselves in.

Despite the increasing relevance of multiple prior beliefs in various domains of economics and beyond and the significant theoretical work on them, little progress has been made on developing choice-based techniques for eliciting them. This paper proposes a new choice-based, incentive-compatible elicitation method for multiple prior beliefs, and implements it in two experiments on continuous sources of uncertainty to elicit the multiple prior equivalent of subjects’ CDFs. The method is theoretically robust, insofar as it applies under a wide range of multiple prior decision models and with few assumptions about the nature of beliefs. In its implementation, we find a significant majority of subjects have non-degenerate sets of priors, with larger sets for more unpredictable events. Finally, we use our method to provide the first elicitation of the mixture parameter in the Hurwicz alpha-maxmin EU model that fully controls for beliefs.

This paper studies communication failure regarding risks in the commons. It provides a rationale for why, in the context of climate change, years of scientific reporting regarding future risks have failed to trigger sufficient climate awareness. We consider a game of contribution to a public bad, where there is uncertainty regarding the damage generated by externalities. Prior to the game, agents receive non-certifiable information regarding the damage from an informed utilitarian expert. We show that limited uncertainty regarding the damage, low marginal damage associated with contributions, and a high number of agents---all three characteristic of large-scale public good problems such as climate change---can each lead to failure of information transmission. We also consider experts with alternative objectives and find that experts favouring the interests of the more exposed agents face a lesser informational problem, in particular when heterogeneity among agents is high. This result highlights the informational virtues of having climate expert panels with such Rawlsian preferences. Finally, we show that effectively informing agents and improving their welfare do not go hand in hand. Remarkably, there are equilibria where the expert has to choose between effectively informing the population and increasing their welfare, and equilibria where the expert warnings are ignored even though they would increase social welfare.

Can a hearer be rationally justified to have beliefs based on testimony alone when the source of his information is known to have conflicting epistemic goals? Building on a game-theoretical approach I suggest that, contrary to the existing views, he can. But this justification relies on an equilibrium concept, which is only reached on the long run. In addition, the hearer's justified beliefs will always be more imprecise than the one held by the original source. These results highlight the importance of scientific norms which, in practice, are the embodiment of these equilibrium mechanisms and thus of scientific credibility. 

We propose an original approach to test gender identity and gender implicit bias as drivers of teachers' gendered behaviour, using both a theoretical framework and an empirical approach. We first plan to develop a theoretical model to understand teachers' behaviour. We distinguish two hypotheses: one where teachers are purely utilitarian and one where their behaviour is restricted by ethical principles. The idea is to assess whether gendered practices stem from gender differences in preferences---in a purely consequentialist way---or if ethical considerations are at play. We then plan to empirically test the theoretical predictions using an online experiment with high school teachers. 

In secondary education, marking holds a pivotal role in shaping students’ academic trajectories and, ultimately, their labor prospects. Grades serve as a compass guiding students, parents, educators, and institutions in navigating the path toward educational success. Crucially, the fairness and reliability of this process depends on the accuracy of the grades themselves. This study aims at accurately estimate the amount of noise in secondary education professional ratings of students’ profile. We als identify some raters’ characteristics that might affect the level of variations in the evaluations. Finally we propose a simple set of rules to help select two raters for each candidate, in a way that minimize the amount of noise in the ratings.

This paper considers a game of sequential cheap-talk communication between a receiver and two senders who are imperfectly informed about the state. Senders and the receiver have singled-peaked utilities but with different optimal actions under certainty. As a result, full revelation is not possible,  although it would lead to a Pareto dominant situation. I show that even if no sender learns the state from nature, the receiver can end-up learning it from their successive messages. Unlike in similar models in the literature, this can happen when senders are biased in the same direction and even identical. Yet, a wider range of states can be revealed when senders are more heterogeneous. The quality of the first sender's expertise is decisive in the process. Those results show that sequential communication, even when senders are poorly informed and of similar motive, can account for a form of collective foundation of knowledge. 

We propose to take the notion of pragmatic encroachment (PE) to the social world and argue that, in many important cases, what is at stake for an individual contrasts so drastically with what is at stake on a global level, that believing p may be irrational for a subject, yet rational on a collective level (and vice-versa). While one could see this result as a drawback for PE. We argue the opposite. Determining what is knowledge or justified belief through PE imposes, on the one hand, to determine what collective evidence and stakes should be, and, on the other hand, what individual evidence and stakes should be for a group member. We argue determining these elements is inherently a value-driven, moral task. We see this as a strength for the concept: knowledge or belief justification in the real world cannot and should not be isolated from values and morals. It is PE, and its extension to moral encroachment’s merit to successfully do so.

We elaborate a new solution to the problem of competing epistemic norms and specifically to the competition between the Zetetic and Evidentilist norms. We build on a game-theoretical modelling of norm competition to argue that one should not choose between both norms but always try to pursue a middle ground, where cognitive abilities are shared between their respective requirements. 

We consider a two tiered wholesale electricity market made of a day-ahead and a real-time market. In the retail market, consumers can subscribe a contract with a conventional retailer or cooperate through an aggregator who directly participates in the wholesale electricity market by taking forward positions. These latter depend on the consumer aggregated demand as estimated in the day ahead. Consumers are then penalized in real time on the basis of their prediction errors. To plan the aggregator’s pricing strategy, we model the consumers in a behavioral economics framework and take into account their possibility to churn. We characterize analytically the core of the game and give conditions for its non emptiness. Then we propose an algorithm based on Machine Learning methods (SVR, Neural Network, Regret) to optimize the aggregator’s pricing strategy in a competitive framework. Our results are finally evaluated on a case study based on time series of the power consumptions of 370 Portuguese consumers.