EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A tale of two food stands: Observational learning in the field

Arthur Fishman, Ram Fishman and Uri Gneezy

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019, vol. 159, issue C, 101-108

Abstract: Despite abundant indications that individual choice is influenced by the observed choices of others, field evidence to distinguish rational observational learning, long hypothesized by economists, from mere imitative behavior remains elusive. We report a field study in a unique setting in which university students regularly chose between two adjacent, outwardly similar food stands and in which imitative behavior based on direct communication, saliency, or the desire to dine with others seem implausible. Consistent with the observational learning hypothesis, a robust tendency to choose the more crowded stand was observed when many students were new on campus but not when most consumers had previous experience with the stands, suggesting that observational learning is important when individuals have limited experience or information.

Keywords: Social learning; Observational learning; Herding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268119300058
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:jeborg:v:159:y:2019:i:c:p:101-108

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.01.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:159:y:2019:i:c:p:101-108