We consider an environment where individuals sequentially choose among several actions. The payoff to an individual depends on her action choice, the state of the world, and an idiosyncratic, privately observed preference shock. Under weak conditions, as the number of individuals increases, the sequence of choices always reveals the state of the world. This contrasts with the familiar result for pure common-value environments where the state is 'never' learned, resulting in herds or informational cascades. The medium run dynamics to convergence can be very complex and non-monotone: posterior beliefs may be concentrated on a wrong state for a long time, shifting suddenly to the correct state.
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Paper provided by California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences in its series Working Papers with number
1187.
Length: 29 pages Date of creation: Nov 2003 Date of revision: Publication status: Published: Economic Theory, Vol. 28 (2006) p. 245-64. Handle: RePEc:clt:sswopa:1187
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Matthew Jackson & Ehud Kalai, 1995.
"Social Learning in Recurring Games,"
Discussion Papers
1138, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Goeree, Jacob & Palfrey, Thomas & Rogers, Brian & McKelvey, Richard, 2004.
"Self-correcting Information Cascades,"
Working Papers
1197, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]