Cornell University

7 East Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

View map

Gautam Rao, Harvard University

Not Learning from Others

with John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Matthew Ridley, Frank Schilbach

We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls in an urn after drawing balls with replacement. Participants' guesses are substantially less sensitive to draws made by another player compared to draws made themselves. This result holds when others' signals must be learned through discussion, when they are perfectly communicated by the experimenter, and even when participants see their teammate drawing balls from the urn with their own eyes. We find a crucial role for taking some action to generate one's `own' information, and rule out distrust, confusion, errors in probabilistic thinking, up-front inattention and imperfect recall as channels.

---------------------------

 

While we strongly encourage in-person attendance in 165 Statler Hall, a remote attendance option will also be available. If you are interested in participating remotely, please register at:

 

https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrf-isrzMvGNLqY1p7d-7Wyg6FzGlfYI7I

 

Note: Registration is limited to the Cornell community

 

Note: If you have previously registered for the Fall 2023 Behavioral Economics Workshop, there is no need to re-register—you will use the same link for the entire semester (see your confirmation email).

 

Note: The BEDR Workshop and the Behavioral Economics Workshop use separate links; hence, you still must register for the Behavioral Economics Workshop even if you have already registered for the BEDR Workshop.

3 people are interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity