We study social learning in a social network setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the truth. Agents naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The weights are fixed in the sense of representing average frequency and intensity of...

We propose an extension of the class of rational expectations bubbles (REBs) to the more general rational beliefs setting of Kurz (1994a,b). In a potentially non-stationary but stationarizable environment, among an heterogenous population of agents, it is possible to hold more than one...

We build a search-and-matching algorithm of network dynamics with decision-making under incomplete information, seeking to understand the determinants of the observed gradual downgrading of expert opinion on complicated issues and the decreasing trust in science. Even without fake news,...

We consider a model where each individual (or ethnic minority) is embedded in a network of relation-ships and decides whether or not she wants to be assimilated to the majority norm. Each individual wants her behavior to agree with her personal ideal action or norm but also wants her behavior to...

The paper studies the emergence of contrarian behavior in information networks in an asset pricing market. Financial traders coordinate on similar behavior, but have heterogeneous price expectations and are influenced by friends. According to a popular belief, they are prone to herding. However,...

Markets coordinate the flow of information in the economy, aggregating it through the price mechanism. We develop a dynamic model of information transmission and aggregation in financial and other social networks in which continued membership in the network is contingent on the accuracy of...

I propose a social learning model that investigates how confirmatory bias affects public opinion when agents exchange information over a social network. For that, besides exchanging opinions with friends, individuals observe a public sequence of potentially ambiguous signals and they interpret...

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne's belief about the state is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob's belief, we can construct...

Using a novel pairwise measure of firms' acquisition of rivals' disclosures, we show that investment opportunities drive interfirm information flows. We find that these flows predict subsequent mergers and acquisitions as well as how and how much firms invest, relative to rivals. Moreover,...

Homophily is the tendency of people to associate relatively more with those who are similar to them than with those who are not. In Golub and Jackson (2010a), we introduced degree-weighted homophily (DWH), a new measure of this phenomenon, and showed that it gives a lower bound on the time it...