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Krasnow Institute > Monday
Seminars > Abstracts
The Irrationality of Disagreement
Robin Hanson
Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University
In his most cited paper, Nobel prize winner Robert Aumann (Economics, 2005) showed thirty years ago that Bayesians with a common prior could not "agree to disagree." That is, they could not have common knowledge of exact yet differing opinions. Aumann made strong assumptions, but his basic result holds under much weaker assumptions. We now have a relatively general and robust results to the effect that honest truth-seeking agents should not knowingly disagree. At least they should not disagree when they disapprove of self-favoring initial (i.e., low-information) expectations, or believe that such expectations had symmetric origins. Professor Hanson will review this literature and discuss its disturbing implications for the honesty and rationality of human disagreement.
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