Related papers: Rational Groupthink
We study how long-lived, rational agents learn in a social network. In every period, after observing the past actions of his neighbors, each agent receives a private signal, and chooses an action whose payoff depends only on the state.…
When individuals in a social network learn about an unknown state from private signals and neighbors' actions, the network structure often causes information loss. We consider rational agents and Gaussian signals in the canonical sequential…
We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…
We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…
In the classical herding literature, agents receive a private signal regarding a binary state of nature, and sequentially choose an action, after observing the actions of their predecessors. When the informativeness of private signals is…
We study learning by privately informed forward-looking agents in a simple repeated-action setting of social learning. Under a symmetric signal structure, forward-looking agents behave myopically for any degrees of patience. Myopic…
We develop a model of social learning from overabundant information: Short-lived agents sequentially choose from a large set of (flexibly correlated) information sources for prediction of an unknown state. Signal realizations are public. We…
We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…
Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…
Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
We consider a network of agents that aim to learn some unknown state of the world using private observations and exchange of beliefs. At each time, agents observe private signals generated based on the true unknown state. Each agent might…
We consider a group of agents who can each take an irreversible costly action whose payoff depends on an unknown state. Agents learn about the state from private signals, as well as from past actions of their social network neighbors, which…
We consider a group of strategic agents who must each repeatedly take one of two possible actions. They learn which of the two actions is preferable from initial private signals, and by observing the actions of their neighbors in a social…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
Intelligent agents collect and process information from their dynamically evolving neighbourhood to efficiently navigate through it. However, agent-level intelligence does not guarantee that at the level of a collective; a common example is…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
Can artificial agents benefit from human conventions? Human societies manage to successfully self-organize and resolve the tragedy of the commons in common-pool resources, in spite of the bleak prediction of non-cooperative game theory. On…