Exploration and Persuasion

Understand

How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty.

• They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this information to make good decisions.
• Collectively they need to balance these two objectives, but their incentives are skewed toward exploitation.
• This is because exploration is costly, but its benefits are spread over many agents in the future.