An innovation (e.g., new product or idea) spreads like a virus, transmitted by those who have previously adopted it. Agents update their beliefs about innovation quality based on private signals and when they hear about the innovation. We characterize equilibrium adoption dynamics and the...

Two firms produce substitute goods of unknown quality. At each stage the firms set prices and a consumer with private information and unit demand buys from one of the firms. Both firms and consumers see the entire history of prices and purchases. Will such markets aggregate information? Will the...

We build a model studying the effect of an economy's potential for social learning on the adoption of innovations of uncertain quality. Assuming consumers are forward-looking (i.e., recognize the value of waiting for information), we analyze how qualitative and quantitative features of the...

We introduce a collective experimentation problem where a continuum of agents choose the timing of irreversible actions under uncertainty and where public feedback from the actions arrives gradually over time. The leading application is the adoption of new technologies. The socially optimal...

In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that outcomes improve when agents are mildly condescending. In...

When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in applications such as lobbying, warfare, labor tournaments,...

We explore mechanism design with outcome-based social preferences. Agents' social preferences and private payoffs are all subject to asymmetric information. We assume quasi-linear utility and independent types. We show how the asymmetry of information about agents' social preferences can be...

We show that Bayesian posteriors concentrate on the outcome distributions that approximately minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the empirical distribution, uniformly over sample paths, even when the prior does not have full support. This generalizes Diaconis and Freedman (1990)'s...