American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Fact-Free Learning
American Economic Review
vol. 95,
no. 5, December 2005
(pp. 1355–1368)
Abstract
People may be surprised to notice certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a knowledge base, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value of R2 is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in computer science. We discuss some of the implications of this result and of fact-free learning in general.Citation
Aragones, Enriqueta, Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler. 2005. "Fact-Free Learning." American Economic Review, 95 (5): 1355–1368. DOI: 10.1257/000282805775014308JEL Classification
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief