Pith Number

pith:KIM5JVHD

pith:2026:KIM5JVHD6PCHMLPTDVLC3H3KCP

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Pitfall of Precision in Noisy Signaling

Shuhua Si, Yangfan Zhou

When signal precision is already high, further improvements reduce screening accuracy and lower the principal's welfare.

arxiv:2605.13039 v1 · 2026-05-13 · econ.TH

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\pithnumber{KIM5JVHD6PCHMLPTDVLC3H3KCP}

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4 Citations open

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Claims

C1strongest claim

We uncover a paradoxical 'pitfall of precision': when precision is already high, further improvements reduce screening accuracy and lower the principal's welfare. This occurs because greater precision incentivizes strategic signaling from more low-quality agents, outweighing the direct benefit from improved precision.

C2weakest assumption

Low-quality agents can costlessly or cheaply increase their signaling effort in response to higher precision, and the resulting increase in mimicry outweighs the direct informational gain from reduced noise.

C3one line summary

Higher precision in noisy screening signals can reduce decision accuracy by prompting increased strategic mimicry from low-quality agents.

References

57 extracted · 57 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] The Quarterly Journal of Economics , volume=

[2] Monetary Economics , volume=

[3] Journal of Public Economics , volume= 2009

[4] American Economic Journal: Economic Policy , volume= 2018

[5] Public Finance Review , volume= 2007

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T03:08:59.582320Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5219d4d4e3f3c4762df31d562d9f6a13e88b281f62f364172c4296e0fb9940d0

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.13039 · arxiv_version: 2605.13039v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13039 · pith_short_12: KIM5JVHD6PCH · pith_short_16: KIM5JVHD6PCHMLPT · pith_short_8: KIM5JVHD

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/KIM5JVHD6PCHMLPTDVLC3H3KCP \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 5219d4d4e3f3c4762df31d562d9f6a13e88b281f62f364172c4296e0fb9940d0

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "30ce0ac420d90de282fd61b9e69938c949ee20b8b131483fa6027a75ba0d2723",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "econ.TH",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-13T05:50:02Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "daed98211a5ffc9d864a6922533aea32a6ccc8c35f15545d23bf2cf8d1cc091d"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.13039",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}