Weak identifiability and its consequences in strategic settings

One way that agents might become involved in catastrophic conflict is if they have mistaken beliefs about one another. Maybe I think you are bluffing when you threaten to launch the nukes, but you are dead serious. So we should understand why agents might sometimes have such mistaken beliefs. In this post I'll discuss one obstacle to the formation of accurate beliefs about other agents, which has to do with identifiability. As with my post on equilibrium and prior selection problems, this is a theme that keeps cropping up in my thinking about AI cooperation and conflict, so I thought it might be helpful to have it written up. We say that a model is unidentifiable if there are several […]

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