There is an asymmetry regarding what previous decisions depositors may observe when choosing whether to withdraw or keep the money deposited: it is more likely that withdrawals are observed. We study how decision-making changes if depositors are able to make their decision to keep their funds in...

We study the Diamond-Dybvig model of financial intermediation (JPE, 1983) under the assumption that depositors have information about previous decisions. Depositors decide sequentially whether to withdraw their funds or continue holding them in the bank. If depositors observe the history of all...

Starting from Schelling (1960), several game theorists have conjectured that payoff equity might facilitate coordination in normal-form games with multiple equilibria ?the more equitable equilibrium might be selected either because fairness makes it focal or because many individuals dislike...

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). We study the role of social media in mobilization. In a simple model we assume that while social media allow to observe all previous decisions, mass media only give aggregate...

We report experimental evidence on the effect of observability of actions on bank runs. We model depositors' decision-making in a sequential framework, with three depositors located at the nodes of a network. Depositors observe the other depositors' actions only if connected by the network....

Does students' hand tremble after marking three consecutive identical answers in a multiple choice test? We design an experiment to study if the likelihood to change incorrectly to a different answer than the last one depends on the number of identical previous answers. We do not find a clear...

We assess the impact of cognitive abilities on withdrawal decisions in a bank-run game. In our setup, depositors choose sequentially between withdrawing or keeping their funds deposited in a common bank. They may observe previous decisions depending on the information structure. Theoretically,...

Empirical descriptions and studies suggest that generally depositors observe a sample of previous decisions before deciding if to keep their funds deposited or to withdraw them. These observed decisions may exhibit different degrees of correlation across depositors. In our model depositors are...

We propose a discrete time probabilistic model of depositor behavior which takes into account the information flow among depositors. In each time period each depositors' current state is determined in a stochastic way, based on its previous state, the state of other connected depositors and the...

We provide experimental evidence that panic bank runs occur in the absence of problems with fundamentals and coordination failures among depositors, the two main culprits identified in the literature. Depositors withdraw when they observe that others do so, even when theoretically they should...