Forecasting and Manipulating the Forecasts of Others

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Babichenko, Sam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866918512588488704
author Babichenko, Sam
author_facet Babichenko, Sam
contents Finite-player dynamic games with dispersed private information are difficult because actions both move payoffs and reshape what opponents learn, generating hierarchies of beliefs about beliefs. This paper provides a recursive representation for this problem. The noise state records agents' beliefs about the underlying shocks that generate histories, so higher-order beliefs are generated by composition rather than tracked as separate state variables. In the canonical continuous-time LQG benchmark, the representation becomes explicit: beliefs, value gradients, and policy rules are deterministic impulse-response functions, and equilibrium is a deterministic fixed point in those functions. Any fixed point in the noise-state linear class is a Nash equilibrium against arbitrary admissible \(L^2\) deviations. The first-order system contains an information wedge, the shadow price of changing opponents' posteriors. In a two-player benchmark, the wedge explains why pooling gains are mostly strategic, why optimal precision allocation can starve an inefficient player of information, and why signal precision changes policy rules themselves, so separation fails.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_12140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Forecasting and Manipulating the Forecasts of Others
Babichenko, Sam
Optimization and Control
Theoretical Economics
Mathematical Finance
91A15, 91B44, 93E11, 93E20, 60H30, 93A14
Finite-player dynamic games with dispersed private information are difficult because actions both move payoffs and reshape what opponents learn, generating hierarchies of beliefs about beliefs. This paper provides a recursive representation for this problem. The noise state records agents' beliefs about the underlying shocks that generate histories, so higher-order beliefs are generated by composition rather than tracked as separate state variables. In the canonical continuous-time LQG benchmark, the representation becomes explicit: beliefs, value gradients, and policy rules are deterministic impulse-response functions, and equilibrium is a deterministic fixed point in those functions. Any fixed point in the noise-state linear class is a Nash equilibrium against arbitrary admissible \(L^2\) deviations. The first-order system contains an information wedge, the shadow price of changing opponents' posteriors. In a two-player benchmark, the wedge explains why pooling gains are mostly strategic, why optimal precision allocation can starve an inefficient player of information, and why signal precision changes policy rules themselves, so separation fails.
title Forecasting and Manipulating the Forecasts of Others
topic Optimization and Control
Theoretical Economics
Mathematical Finance
91A15, 91B44, 93E11, 93E20, 60H30, 93A14
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12140