We develop a model in which an overconfident agent learns about groups in society from observations of his and others' successes. In our model, both the agent's information and his beliefs are multi-dimensional, allowing us to study interactions between different views. Overall, society always...

Whether trade can achieve societal change is a contested topic and difficult to investigate. This round-up aims at summarizing recent empirical research on this topic while focusing on democracy and democratization as an important part of societal change. No robust results for change arising...

We address the issue of risk aversion in a competitive equilibrium when some buyers engage in learning and information is conveyed through the price system. Specifically, since the learning process yields uncertainty, we study the effect of risk aversion on the equilibrium outcomes of the model,...

Consumer reviews may have perverse effects, including delays of adoption in new products of unknown quality when consumers are boundedly rational. When consumers fail to take into account that past reviewers self-select to purchases, a monopolist may manipulate the posterior beliefs of consumers...

I investigate the identification of social learning in online markets. In these markets, there is often a two-stage decision making process where a consumer first chooses whether or not to search a product and then chooses whether or not to buy it. Additionally, the social learning signals are...

Self-interested agents produce information in an attempt to convince a principal to act on their behalf. Agents provide less informative evidence than the principal prefers since doing so maximizes the probability the principal acts in their favor. If the principal faces constraints that limit...

Consumers choosing flat-rate contracts tend to have insufficient usage to warrant the cost, particularly for new products. We propose and estimate a Bayesian learning model of tariff and usage choice that explains this "flat-rate bias'' without relying on behavioral misjudgments or...

This paper investigates whether aggregate consumer learning together with consumer heterogeneity in price sensitivity could explain why (i) there is a slow diffusion of generic drugs into the market, and (ii) brand-name originators keep increasing their prices over time even after the number of...

Consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by others’ opinions, i.e., word-of-mouth (WOM), and/or others’ actions, i.e., observational learning. While information technologies are creating increasing opportunities for firms to facilitate/manage these two types of social interaction,...

Networks and the embedded relationships are critical determinants of how people communicate and form beliefs. The explosion of social media has significantly increased the scope and impact of social learning among consumers. This paper studies observational learning in networks of friends versus...