Social learning under ambiguity - an experimental study

The social media age has meant that many behaviours spread through contact with others. The extent to which people adopt/imitate behaviour they observe, can critically affect whether policymakers are successful when introducing new initiatives. In many situations people can either make decisions based on their own intuitive signals or follow a social signal. Depending on the quality of the signals one might be more informative than the other. This project aims to better understand how people use social information to learn and imitate others in ambiguous situations, when both the private and the social signal are not perfectly informative. We conduct an experimental study that observes whether people are prone to imitate others in risky and ambiguous environments, and in gain and loss domain settings. We find that individuals do significantly learn from social information, independent of the framing. Social learning behaviour is not significantly affected by ambiguity. (abstract of the paper)