Rational herd behavior and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding. Employing a...

There are many economic environments in which an object is offered sequentially to prospective buyers. It is often observed that once the object for sale is turned down by one or more agents, those that follow do the same. One explanation that has been proposed for this phenomenon, which goes...

There are many economic environments in which an object is offered sequentially to prospective buyers. It is often observed that once the object for sale is turned down by one or more agents, those that follow do the same. One explanation that has been proposed for this phenomenon is that agents...

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information...

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is...

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is...