This paper studies properties of stochastic objective functions, that is, objective functions which can be written as the expected value of a payoff function.

This paper systematically analyses and enriches the observational learning paradigm of Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani, Hirscleifer, and Welch (1992).

The paper provides a general analysis of the types of models with E-Perturbations which have been used recently to discuss the evolution of social conventions. Two new measures of the size and structure of the basins of attraction of dynamic systems, the radius and coradius, are introduced in...

Social commentators from William Julius Wilson to Charles Murray have argued that increased sorting people into internally homogeneous neighborhoods, schools, and marriages is spurring long- run inequality. Calibration of a formal model suggests that these fears are misplaced.

We prove that the recently proposed informational herding models are but special cases of a standard single person experimentation model with myopia. We then re-interpret the incorrect herding outcome as a familiar failure of complete learning in an optimal experimentation problem.