Rational Groupthink*

Matan Harel, Elchanan Mossel, Philipp Strack () and Omer Tamuz

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021, vol. 136, issue 1, 621-668

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.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjaa026 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Rational Groupthink (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:1:p:621-668.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().