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...

Many internet auction sites implement ascending-bid, second-price auctions. Empirically, last minute or quot;latequot; bidding is frequently observed in quot;hard-closequot; but not in quot;soft-closequot; versions of these auctions. In this paper, we introduce an independent private-value...

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...

Students who are going to be successful in life must learn to acquire knowledge using all kinds of platforms. The belief that the only way people can learn is via classroom instruction is obsolete. Moreover, research does not support this view. The authors show how online learning is an...

This paper examines social learning when only one of the two types of decisions is observable. Because agents arrive randomly over time, and only those who invest are observed, later agents face a more complicated inference problem than in the standard model, as the absence of investment might...