Informational Herding and Optimal Experimentation
We show that far from capturing a formally new phenomenon, informational herding is really a special case of single-person experimentation -- and 'bad herds' the typical failure of complete learning. We then analyze the analogous team equilibrium, where individuals maximize the present discounted welfare of posterity. To do so, we generalize Gittins indices to our non-bandit learning problem, and thereby characterize when contrarian behaviour arises: (i) While herds are still constrained efficient, they arise for a strictly smaller belief set. (ii) A log-concave log-likelihood ratio density robustly ensures that individuals should lean more against their myopic preference for an action the more popular it becomes.
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| Length: | 39 pages |
| Date of creation: | Jan 2006 |
| Handle: | RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1552 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: Yale University, Box 208281, New Haven, CT 06520-8281 USA Phone: (203) 432-3702 Fax: (203) 432-6167 Web page: http://cowles.yale.edu/ More information through EDIRC
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| Order Information: | Postal: Cowles Foundation, Yale University, Box 208281, New Haven, CT 06520-8281 USA |
References listed on IDEAS
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