Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

We present a field study of social learning. The setting is a pair of adjacent fast food restaurants serving very similar cuisine whose main clientele are the students at a nearby major university. We observed whether an uninformed customer's choice of restaurant depends on the relative queue...

To study effects of out-of-school learning we use data on boarding home pupils who attended elementary public schools in the 1940's. The out-of-school environment at the boarding homes could be considered being more learner friendly than the home environment on average: the pupils at the...

How do people learn? We assess, in a distribution-free manner, subjects' learning and choice rules in dynamic two-armed bandit (probabilistic reversal learning) experiments. To aid in identification and estimation, we use auxiliary measures of subjects' beliefs, in the form of their...

In the context of the low levels of regional cooperation among South Asian countries when compared with the successful results from cooperation in East Asia (consisting of South East and East Asian countries), the objective of this paper is first to assess the prospects of cooperation among...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents' production technologies display learning effects and agents' rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show that...

We study the problem of learning the probability distribution of a multinomial variable from an observed sequence of signals, starting in a condition of ignorance about this distribution. We show that not all signals are suited for producing non-vacuous inferences under prior ignorance. To...