Meet Meets Join: The Interaction between Private and Common Knowledge

17 Pages Posted: 6 Jan 2020

Date Written: December 16, 2019

Abstract

This paper explores the lattice-theoretic properties of the complete lattice of the family of all partitions of an arbitrary state space. I discuss a duality correspondence connecting meets (finest common coarsening) and joins (coarsest common refinement) of families of partitions, confirming their natural order-theoretic characterizations. The partition lattice turns out to fail to be a distributive, or even a modular, lattice. I provide intuitive interpretations of these negative results in terms of the interaction between common knowledge and pooling multiple sources of information, with applications to information exchange within and between different populations and to criminal procedure law.

Keywords: information, knowledge, partitions, lattice

JEL Classification: C60, D82, D83, K14

Suggested Citation

Tóbiás, Áron, Meet Meets Join: The Interaction between Private and Common Knowledge (December 16, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3504551 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3504551

Áron Tóbiás (Contact Author)

Syracuse University ( email )

110 Eggers Hall
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1020
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.arontobias.com

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