Related papers: Herding driven by the desire to differ
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…
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…
An evolving population, in which individual members (`agents') adapt their behaviour according to past experience, is of central importance to many disciplines. Because of their limited knowledge and capabilities, agents are forced to make…
Observational learning is a type of learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and possibly replicating or imitating the behaviour of another agent. It is a core mechanism appearing in various instances of social learning…
Decisions in a group often result in imitation and aggregation, which are enhanced in panic, dangerous, stressful or negative situations. Current explanations of this enhancement are restricted to particular contexts, such as anti-predatory…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
We study a sequential-learning model featuring a network of naive agents with Gaussian information structures. Agents apply a heuristic rule to aggregate predecessors' actions. They weigh these actions according the strengths of their…
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…
The theoretical study of social learning typically assumes that each agent's action affects only her own payoff. In this paper, I present a model in which agents' actions directly affect the payoffs of other agents. On a discrete time line,…
I study the problem of social learning in a model where agents move sequentially. Each agent receives a private signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions in a neighborhood of individuals, and chooses her…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…
Theoretical models of populations and swarms typically start with the assumption that the motion of agents is governed by the local stimuli. However, an intelligent agent, with some understanding of the laws that govern its habitat, can…
This paper considers the problem of offering a scarce object with a common unobserved quality to strategic agents in a priority queue. Each agent has a private signal over the quality of the object and observes the decisions made by other…
Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
Here we study the emergence of spontaneous leadership in large populations. In standard models of opinion dynamics, herding behavior is only obeyed at the local scale due to the interaction of single agents with their neighbors; while at…
We introduce and solve a model that mimics the herding effect in financial markets when groups of agents share information. The number of agents in the model is growing and at each time step either (i) with probability $p$ an incoming agent…
Predator-prey coevolution is commonly thought to result in reciprocal arms races that produce increasingly extreme and complex traits. However, such directional change is not inevitable. Here, we provide evidence for a previously…
Agents' learning from feedback shapes economic outcomes, and many economic decision-makers today employ learning algorithms to make consequential choices. This note shows that a widely used learning algorithm, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, exhibits…