An “information cascade” occurs when initial decisions coincide in a way that it is optimal for each of the subsequent individuals to ignore her or his private signals and follow the established pattern. Moscarini et. al (1996) developed a social learning model hitherto unexplored in an...

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...