To make high-quality research more accessible and easier to explore.

Fields:
2 results ✕ Clear filters

Pathological Outcomes of Observational Learning

Econometrica 2000 68(2), 371-398 open access
This paper explores how Bayes-rational individuals learn sequentially from the discrete actions of others. Unlike earlier informational herding papers, we admit heterogeneous preferences. Not only may type-specific ‘herds’ eventually arise, but a new robust possibility emerges: confounded learning. Beliefs may converge to a limit point where history offers no decisive lessons for anyone, and each type's actions forever nontrivially split between two actions. To verify that our identified limit outcomes do arise, we exploit the Markov-martingale character of beliefs. Learning dynamics are stochastically stable near a fixed point in many Bayesian learning models like this one.

Strategic Sample Selection

Econometrica 2021 89(2), 911-953 open access
Are the highest sample realizations selected from a larger presample more or less informative than the same amount of random data? Developing multivariate accuracy for interval dominance ordered preferences, we show that sample selection always benefits (or always harms) a decision maker if the reverse hazard rate of the data distribution is log‐supermodular (or log‐submodular), as in location experiments with normal noise. We find nonpathological conditions under which the information contained in the winning bids of a symmetric auction decreases in the number of bidders. Exploiting extreme value theory, we quantify the limit amount of information revealed when the presample size (number of bidders) goes to infinity. In a model of equilibrium persuasion with costly information, we derive implications for the optimal design of selected experiments when selection is made by an examinee, a biased researcher, or contending sides with the peremptory challenge right to eliminate a number of jurors.