The phenomenon of choice shifts in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made...

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers agreement to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding valuations,...

The phenomenon of choice shifts in group decision-making has received attention in the social psychology literature. Faced with a risky group decision, individuals appear to support more extreme choices relative to those they would make on their own. This paper demonstrates that from a...

We model an individual who wants to learn about a state of the world. The individual has a prior belief and has data that consist of multiple forecasts about the state of the world. Our key assumption is that the decision maker identifies explanations that could have generated this data and...

In this paper we question the common wisdom that more polarized voters’ opinions imply larger policy polarization. We analyze a voting model in which the source of the polarization in voters’ opinions is “correlation neglect”, that is, voters neglect the correlation in their information...

In this paper we examine the long term effects of socialization and segregation in schools, on labour market outcomes. We incorporate a model of “informational” peer influence by which beliefs of pupils are affected by exposure to other pupils’ posterior beliefs. Specifically, we focus on...