Consensus and common knowledge of an aggregate of decisions (Q2427138)

It was shown in the literature that: (1) if individuals have the same prior probability, and (2) if the statistic satisfies a stochastic regularity condition, then common knowledge of it implies equality of all individual posterior probabilities [see \textit{R. D. McKelvey} and \textit{T. Page}, Econometrica 54, 109--127 (1986; Zbl 0578.90019)]. The author of the present paper addresses the same question in a more general setting, where agents of a group have common knowledge of a statistic of their individual decisions. The paper investigates what conditions should be imposed on the decision rule and the statistic to guarantee that, in a group of individuals, common knowledge of the value of the statistic implies that everyone behaves as if there were no private infoi nation. It is shown that: (1) if the decision rule is balanced union consistent, and (2) if the statistic is exhaustive, then individuals cannot take different decisions, if the statistic is common knowledge, although private information might remain different. Balanced union consistency is slightly stronger than union consistency considered by \textit{J. Cave} [Learning to agree, Econ. Letters 12, 147--152 (1983)]. The exhaustiveness condition requires that the statistic should describe how many agents carry out each decision.