We show that far from capturing a formally new phenomenon, informational herding is really a special case of single-person experimentation -- and 'bad herds' the typical failure of complete learning. We then analyze the analogous team equilibrium, where individuals maximize the present...

Consider Becker's classic 1963 matching model, with unobserved fixed types and stochastic publicly observed output. If types are complementary, then matching is assortative in the known Bayesian posteriors (the 'reputations'). We discover a robust failure of Becker's result in the simplest...