Context and Disagreement

Context Dependence , Disagreement , and Predicates of Personal Taste

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of ‘‘personal taste’’ such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Non...

Disagreement and Information Collection

This note shows that disagreement, in the sense of differing priors, may increase the incentives to collect information when two agents work on a joint project. The reason is that each agent believes that new data will confirm his own beliefs and thus ‘convince’ the other agents to do what the focal agent thinks is right.

Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

Disagreement and Authority ∗

Can two negotiators fail to agree when both the size of the surplus and the rationality of the negotiators are common knowledge? We show that the answer is affirmative. When the negotiators can make irrevocable commitments at a low but positive cost, the unique symmetric equilibrium entails disagreement with high probability. In the unique pair of pure strategy equilibria, one party gets all th...

Public Disagreement∗

Members of different social groups often hold widely divergent public beliefs regarding the nature of the world in which they live. We develop a model that can accommodate such public disagreement, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the consequences of social integration. The model involves heterogeneous priors, private information, and rep...