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Published February 2021 | Supplemental Material + Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Rational Groupthink

Abstract

We study how long-lived rational agents learn from repeatedly observing a private signal and each others' actions. With normal signals, a group of any size learns more slowly than just four agents who directly observe each others' private signals in each period. Similar results apply to general signal structures. We identify rational groupthink—in which agents ignore their private signals and choose the same action for long periods of time—as the cause of this failure of information aggregation.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Published: 08 July 2020. We thank seminar audiences in Berkeley, Berlin, Bonn, Caltech, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Duke, Harvard, Medellın, Microsoft Research New England, MIT, Montreal, NYU, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Princeton, San Diego, UPenn, USC, Washington University, and Yale, as well as Nageeb Ali, Ben Brooks, Dirk Bergemann, Kim Border, Federico Echenique, Wade Hann-Caruthers, Benjamin Golub, RainieHeck, Paul Heidhues, Shachar Kariv, Navin Kartik, StevenMorris, Luciano Pomatto, Larry Samuelson, Lones Smith, Juuso Toikka, Leeat Yariv, and others for insightful comments and discussions. Matan Harel was partially supported by the IDEX grant of Paris-Saclay. Elchanan Mossel is supported by ONR grant N00014-16-1-2227 and NSF grant CCF 1320105. Omer Tamuz was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (#419427).

Attached Files

Published - qjaa026.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v1.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v2.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v3.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v4.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v5.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v6.pdf

Submitted - 1412.7172v7.pdf

Supplemental Material - qjaa026_online_appendix.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023