As expectations are driven by information, its selection is central in explaining common knowledge building and unraveling in financial markets. This paper addresses this information selection problem by proposing imitation as a key mechanism to explain opinion dynamics. Behavioral and cognitive...

In this article, we show experimentally that individuals can adapt their decision making to social environments, like markets, and respond strategically to biases, such as regret aversion. We find they can employ herding as a behaviorally rational strategy to improve their expected outcomes and...

Rational and irrational herding simultaneously exists in online P2P lending markets. Rational herding decreases the default rate and is viewed as “good money”, while irrational herding increases the default rate and view as “bad money”. Considering the existence of information asymmetry...

This paper shows that globalization of securities markets exacerbates the volatility of capital flows by strengthening incentives for herding behavior. This is a prediction of a mean-variance portfolio optimization model with imperfect information, in which investors acquire country-specific...

This document presents supporting materials for the following publication: Zhang, Juanjuan and Peng Liu (2012), "Rational Herding in Microloan Markets," Management Science, Vol. 58, No. 5, May, pp. 892-912.Microloan markets allow individual borrowers to raise funding from multiple individual...