implications of social learning for a monopolist firm's choice of product design. In our model, the firm's design choice determines … of the ex ante quality uncertainty surrounding the product. In comparison to the case where there is no social learning …, social learning can have an ex ante negative impact on the firm's profit, in particular when the consumers are sufficiently …

We study observational learning in environments where customers choose among multiple options with uncertain quality … when the fraction of informed customers in the market is low. We test the predictions from our observational learning model … learning might be problematic even for high quality firms, which gain less market share than theoretically predicted, and may …

conjoint methodologies. The first, based on transfer learning, has the researcher learn about a focal category (e.g. yogurt) by …

. We find that the firm encourages social learning for a greater range of beliefs and has greater expected revenue when it …