Related papers: Endogenous Quality in Social Learning

Potential buyers of a product or service, before making their decisions, tend to read reviews written by previous consumers. We consider Bayesian consumers with heterogeneous preferences, who sequentially decide whether to buy an item of…

I study a social learning model in which the object to learn is a strategic player's endogenous actions rather than an exogenous state. A patient seller faces a sequence of buyers and decides whether to build a reputation for supplying high…

We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…

We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…

We study the implications of endogenous pricing for learning and welfare in the classic herding model . When prices are determined exogenously, it is known that learning occurs if and only if signals are unbounded. By contrast, we show that…

One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing…

We study expert advice under reputational incentives, with sell-side equity research as the lead application. A long-lived analyst receives a continuous private signal about a binary payoff and recommends a risky (Buy) or safe action.…

A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…

This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When…

We study a two-sided online data ecosystem comprised of an online platform, users on the platform, and downstream learners or data buyers. The learners can buy user data on the platform (to run a statistic or machine learning task).…

We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…

We study social learning from multiple experts whose precision is unknown and who care about reputation. The observer both learns a persistent state and ranks experts. In a binary baseline we characterize per-period equilibria: high types…

We analyze a two-period, two-market chain-store game in which an incumbent's conduct in one market is only sometimes seen in the other. This partial observability generates reputational spillovers across markets. We characterize equilibrium…

Many of the observations we make are biased by our decisions. For instance, the demand of items is impacted by the prices set, and online checkout choices are influenced by the assortments presented. The challenge in decision-making under…

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,…

Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component that enables…

Despite strong evidence for peer effects, little is known about how individuals balance intrinsic preferences and social learning in different choice environments. Using a combination of experiments and discrete choice modeling, we show…

We study dynamic signaling when the informed party does not observe the signals generated by her actions. A long-run player signals her type continuously over time to a myopic second player who privately monitors her behavior; in turn, the…

We study the behavior of for-profit institutions that broadcast reputations to foster trust among market participants. We develop a theoretical model in which buyers and sellers are matched on a platform to engage in transactions involving…

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…