This paper looks at the incentives to free-ride on the information signaling of others and shows how this can lead to delay in productive activity and to a cascade of activity once information is signaled. In the presence of increasing returns to scale to a profitable project, an initial pioneer...

We study economic environments in which agents make choices on the basis of relative performance criteria and call the associated class of dynamic adjustment rules "comparative dynamics". We distinguish two classes of learning behavior: learning from the population experience (imitative...