Journal of Political Economy Vol. 103 No. 5 1995
Endogenous Timing and the Clustering of Agents' Decisions
Abstract
This paper presents a model in which agents choose an action and a time at which to take the action. We show that when agents choose when to act, their decisions become clustered together, giving the appearance of an information cascade, even though information is actually being used efficiently. This occurs because the passage of time allows the first acting agent to anticipate something about the second agent's information, and for a large class of delay cost functions, the equilibrium orders agents in such a way that the most extreme information is revealed first.
- Volume
- 103
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1039-1066
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib