Observational learning is typically examined when agents have precise information about their position in the sequence … individuals and receive a private signal about the state of the world. We show that social learning is robust to position … uncertainty. Under any sampling rule satisfying a stationarity assumption, learning is complete if signal strength is unbounded …

Research provides some observations about learning from events that appear to be rare or quite unusual. All learning … has uncertain consequences, but learning from rare events is especially problematic. Learners see many idiosyncrasies and … exogenous interference, tendencies that suppress learning on an organizational scale. Rare events also rouse uncertainty and …