主题：Belief bifurcation in an increasingly interconnected world?（高度互联世界的信念分化问题研究）
主讲人：张雷 教授
时间：5月21日 9：30-10：30
地点：励教楼C501
主办机构：创新发展研究中心
主讲人简介
张雷，四川大学经济学院教授，教育部海外名师，曾任英国华威大学经济系副教授，英格兰银行Houblon Norman and George 研究员。张雷教授的主要研究领域为金融经济学、宏观经济学、国际经济学等。目前已在世界十大经济学期刊之一的Economic Journal上先后发表过6篇论文，也在Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control、Oxford Economic Papers、《经济研究》等国内外一流学术期刊上发表十多篇论文，是Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Industrial Economics等期刊的匿名审稿人。
内容简介
The recent history of globalization suggests that an increasing interconnection between countries brought about by technological progress, though produced tremendous benefits to the world economy on average, engenders vastly different views and attitudes among different population groups. This divergence of opinions can significantly affect not only domestic politics, but also international cooperation.
In a world where individual verification of the true state of nature is prohibitively costly, a naturally rational belief-updating-rule would be that the individual uses the weighted average of his/her own signal and those of his/her neighbor’s to form the belief. So the Bayesian updating rule would include the average of the neighbor’s opinions. In a highly and quite evenly interconnected population in which individual belief updating is Bayesian, posterior beliefs in the population tend to converge, contrary to what have been observed. By retaining the assumption that belief updating is Bayesian, this paper puts forward a hypothesis that sufficient degree of homophile in choosing interconnection could in principle generate bifurcation in posterior beliefs as homophile disproportionally favors in-group connectivity. As these posterior beliefs may not reflect the true state of nature, actions taken based on these beliefs may result in inferior welfare.