How Do People Learn by Listening to Others? Experimental Evidence from Thailand

Andrew Healy (ahealy1976@gmail.com)

Experimental from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper presents experimental evidence about how individuals learn from information that comes from inside versus outside their ethnic group. In the experiment, Thai subjects observed information that came from Americans and other Thais that they could use to help them answer a series of questions. Two main findings emerge. First, subjects display overconfidence in their own opinions and place too low a value on the information that they observe. Second, conditional on this overconfidence, subjects weigh American information relative to Thai information in a nearly optimal way. The data also indicates that subjects appear to understand that outside information has extra value because people from different groups know different things and so have an opportunity to learn from each other.

Keywords: laboratory experiment; economic development; Bayesian updating; behavioral economics; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C53 C91 D83 O10 Q16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2005-12-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 59. 44 double-spaced pages text, 15 pages experimental instructions and tables
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https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/exp/papers/0512/0512006.pdf (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpex:0512006

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