This paper revisits Wald's (1947) sequential experimentation paradigm, now assuming that an impatient decision maker can run variable-size experiments each period at some increasing and strictly convex cost before finally choosing an irreversible action. We translate this natural discrete time...

In the social learning model of Banerjee [1] and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch [2] individuals take actions sequentially after observing the history of actions taken by the predecessors and an informative private signal. If the state of the world is changing stochastically over time during...

In the social learning model of Banerjee (1992) and Kikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch (1992), individuals take actions sequentially after observing the history of actions taken by the predecessors and an informative private signal. If the state of the world is changing stochastically over time...

This paper systematically analyzes and enriches the observational learning paradigm of Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). Our contributions fall into three categories. First, we develop what we consider to be the right analytic framework for informational herding...

This paper explores rational social learning in which everyone only sees unordered random samples from the action history. In this model, herds need not occur when the distant past can be sampled. If private signal strengths are unbounded and the past is not over-sampled -- not forever affected...

Recent empirical findings have emphasized post entry growth of survivors, as opposed to exit of inefficient and small firms, as the main source of growth over time in the average size of a cohort of entering firms. One proposed explanation for the post entry growth of survivors is financing...

We study how a continuum of agents learn about disseminated information in a dynamic beauty contest model when they do not observe aggregate variables, such as prices or quantities, but randomly observe each other's actions. We solve for the market equilibrium and find that the average learning...

This paper develops and structurally estimates a learning model in which firms acquire information about workers' ability by observing their performance over time. A firm consists of a collection of jobs which differ in the informational content of performance, as measured by the dispersion in...