Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2024, Volume 92, Issue 4

Beyond Unbounded Beliefs: How Preferences and Information Interplay in Social Learning

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21470
p. 1033-1062

Navin Kartik, SangMok Lee, Tianhao Liu, Daniel Rappoport

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability. Excludability is a joint property of agents' preferences and their information. We develop two classes of preferences and information that jointly satisfy excludability: (i) for a one‐dimensional state, preferences with single‐crossing differences and a new informational condition, directionally unbounded beliefs; and (ii) for a multi‐dimensional state, intermediate preferences and subexponential location‐shift information. These applications exemplify that with multiple states, “unbounded beliefs” is not only unnecessary for learning, but incompatible with familiar informational structures like normal information. Unbounded beliefs demands that a single agent can identify the correct action. Excludability, on the other hand, only requires that a single agent must be able to displace any wrong action, even if she cannot take the correct action.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Beyond Unbounded Beliefs: How Preferences and Information Interplay in Social Learning"

Navin Kartik, SangMok Lee, Tianhao Liu, and Daniel Rappoport

This supplemental appendix contains material not found within the manuscript.

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