We study observational learning in environments with congestion costs: as more of one's predecessors choose an action, the payoff from choosing that action decreases. If congestion on either action can get so large that an agent would prefer to take the other action no matter his beliefs about...

In social-learning environments, we investigate implications of the assumption that people naively believe that each previous person's action reflects solely that person's private information, leading them to systematically imitate all predecessors even in the many circumstances where rational...

There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people’s actions are contingent on these others’ information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, "cursed equilibrium", which assumes that each player correctly...

We investigate experimentally whether social learners appreciate the redundancy of information conveyed by their observed predecessors\' actions. Each participant observes a private signal and enters an estimate of the sum of all earlier-moving participants\' signals plus her own. In a first...