Social norms are ubiquitous in human life. Their role is essential in allowing cooperation to prevail, despite the presence of incentives to free ride. As far as norm enforcement devices are concerned, it would be impossible to have widespread social norms if second parties only enforced them....

This paper purports to provide some evidence on the effect of rating agencies on herding in financial markets. By means of a laboratory experiment, we investigate the effect and interaction between private and public information. Previous experiments showed that lemmings behaviour can survive in...

In his "Simple model of herd behaviour", Banerjee (1992) shows that - in a sequential game - if the first two players have chosen the same action, player 3 and all subsequent players will ignore his/her own information and start a herd, an irreversible one. In this paper we analyse the role...