Obliczeniowa epistemologia społeczna: Studium przypadku dwuramiennych bandytów kontra 
indukcyjnych poszukiwaczy prawdy i epistemicznych gapowiczów z ograniczonym zaufaniem  
[Computational social epistemology: A case study on two-armed bandits versus inductive 
truth seekers and epistemic free riders with bounded confidence]

Rainer Hegselmann (Research Center for Modeling and Simulation - MODUS, 
University of Bayreuth and Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Germany)


The talk is about a community in which individuals gather experimental evidence, modify 
their opinions in a social exchange process, and act on their actual opinions.  An 
extended version of the so called bounded confidence model is the central tool of 
analysis. 

In the extended model, a community has a choice between n strategies (n = 2), each of 
which leads to success with a constant but unknown probability. Such problems are known 
as n-armed bandit problems. Part of the community consists of truth seekers who 
experiment with the two strategies and evaluate their experiences. Another part of the 
community consists of epistemic free-riders who do not do any statistics at all. At the 
same time, however, both groups, the truth seekers and the free riders, are involved in 
a social exchange process. Overall, we are dealing with the dynamics of truth 
approximation in an epistemic community in which both an objective and a social 
component are at work. 

I hope to show that the given scenario is both rich and simple enough not only to 
formulate but also to answer interesting efficiency questions about different epistemic 
policies.