The value of conceptual knowledge

Abstract

We formalize what it means to have conceptual knowledge about a statistical decision-making environment. Such knowledge tells agents about the structural relationships among unknown, payoff-relevant states. It allows agents to represent states as combinations of features. Conceptual knowledge is more valuable when states are more "reducible": when their prior variances are explained by fewer features. Its value is non-monotone in the quantity and quality of available data, and vanishes with infinite data. Agents with deeper knowledge can attain the same welfare with less data. This is especially true when states are highly reducible.

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