Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning

Glenn Ellison () and Drew Fudenberg

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1995, vol. 110, issue 1, 93-125

Abstract: This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite the players' naive decision rules and the stochastic decision environment, word-of-mouth communication may lead all players to adopt the action that is on average superior. These socially efficient outcomes tend to occur when each agent samples only a few others.

Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (368)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2118512 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning (2010)
Working Paper: Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning (1995)
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:110:y:1995:i:1:p:93-125.

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 ().