Informational herding, optimal experimentation, and contrarianism

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Submitted manuscript, 640 KB, PDF document

In the standard herding model, privately informed individuals sequentially see prior actions and then act. An identical action herd eventually starts and public beliefs tend to "cascade sets"where social learning stops. What behaviour is socially efficient when actions ignore informational externalities? We characterize the outcome that maximizes the discounted sum of utilities. Our four key findings are: (1) cascade sets shrink but do not vanish, and herding should occur but less readily as greater weight is attached to posterity. (2) An optimal mechanism rewards individuals mimicked by their successor. (3) Cascades cannot start after period one under a signal log-concavity condition. (4) Given this condition, efficient behaviour is contrarian, leaning against the myopically more popular actions in every period. We make two technical contributions: As value functions with learning are not smooth, we use monotone comparative statics under uncertainty to deduce optimal dynamic behaviour. We also adapt dynamic pivot mechanisms to Bayesian learning.

Original languageEnglish
JournalReview of Economic Studies
Volume88
Issue number5
Pages (from-to)2527-2554
Number of pages28
ISSN0034-6527
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.

    Research areas

  • C73, Cascade, Contrarian, D82, D83, Efficiency, Herding, Logconcavity, Mimicking, Monotonicity

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 291019569