 Social learning under ambiguity—An experimental studySara le Roux and Fabian Bopp Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2025, vol. 114, issue C Abstract: Many behaviours spread through contact with others. The extent to which people adopt observed behaviour can critically affect whether policymakers are successful when introducing new initiatives. In many situations, people can either make decisions based on their own intuitive signals or follow a social signal. Depending on the quality of the signals, one might be more informative than the other. This study aims to better understand how people use social information to learn in ambiguous situations, when both the private and the social signal are not perfectly informative. We conduct an experimental study that observes whether people are prone to imitate others in risky and ambiguous environments. We find that individuals do learn from social information and that this learning is robust and not significantly affected by ambiguity. Keywords: Risk; Ambiguity; Imitating; Social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:114:y:2025:i:c:s2214804324001605 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2024.102323 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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