Sequential Choice and Self-Reinforcing Rankings

Alexandros Gelastopoulos, Pantelis P. Analytis, Francesco Cerigioni and Hrvoje Stojic

No 1318, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: People's behavior is informed and influenced by other people's choices. In many online technologies, for instance, aggregate information about the choices of other individuals is encoded in the form of rankings. Such rankings, in turn, have a direct impact on people's future choices. What are the long-term dynamics of these rankings, and do the dynamics depend on specific assumptions about people's behavior? In this paper, we propose a general framework for modeling the dynamics in settings where information about peoples' past choices is recorded as a ranking and influences future choices. We find a general condition for convergence, show that it is satisfied by many important models in economics and beyond, and characterize the possible limits in terms of the choice probabilities.

Keywords: social learning; ranking; sequential choice; social influence; inattention; herding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D11 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
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