In social-learning environments, we investigate implications of the assumption that people naïvely believe that each previous person's action reflects solely that person's private information. Naïve herders inadvertently over-weight early movers' private signals by neglecting that interim...

We study observational learning in environments with congestion costs: an agent's payoff from choosing an action decreases as more predecessors choose that action. Herds cannot occur if congestion on every action can get so large that an agent prefers a different action regardless of his beliefs...

We study observational learning in environments with congestion costs: as more of one's predecessors choose an action, the payoff from choosing that action decreases. If congestion on either action can get so large that an agent would prefer to take the other action no matter his beliefs about...

In social-learning environments, we investigate implications of the assumption that people naively believe that each previous person's action reflects solely that person's private information, leading them to systematically imitate all predecessors even in the many circumstances where rational...

There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people's actions depend on these other people's information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, cursed equilibrium, which assumes that each player correctly predicts...

We investigate experimentally whether social learners appreciate the redundancy of information conveyed by their observed predecessors\' actions. Each participant observes a private signal and enters an estimate of the sum of all earlier-moving participants\' signals plus her own. In a first...

There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people’s actions are contingent on these others’ information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, "cursed equilibrium", which assumes that each player correctly...