We analyze social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model in which available technologies have correlated payoffs. Each generation experiments within a set of policies whose payoffs are initially unknown and drawn from the path of a Brownian motion with drift. Marginal...

This paper studies network games with strategic complementarities when agents have only partial knowledge of, but some control over, how their actions are mapped into payoff-relevant outcomes. Uncertainty changes several predictions of standard network models. Equilibrium actions are positively...

Open innovation is the practice of combining internal R&D efforts with external sources of knowledge. While project developers allocate effort between internal development and external knowledge processing, knowledge brokers search for relevant external ideas. When external knowledge is...

Why do innovative organizations often reallocate authority? I propose a simple theory in which innovation with new technologies generates an endogenous need for coordination among divisions in the presence of negative cross-divisional externalities. A division manager has private information...

We design a novel experiment to study how subjects update their beliefs about the beliefs of others. Three players receive sequential signals about an unknown state of the world. Player 1 reports her beliefs about the state; Player 2 simultaneously reports her beliefs about the beliefs of Player...

We study the effectiveness of social learning when subjects can also learn individually. In the baseline treatment, a subject observes a sequence of private signals about an unknown state of the world and chooses an action to match the state. In the unilateral social learning treatment, a...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...