Influential Opinion Leaders

Jakub Steiner and Colin Stewart

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: We present a two-stage coordination game in which early choices of experts with special interests are observed by followers who move in the second stage. We show that the equilibrium outcome is biased toward the experts' interests even though followers know the distribution of expert interests and account for it when evaluating observed experts' actions. Expert influence is fully decentralized in the sense that each individual expert has a negligible impact. The bias in favor of experts results from a social learning effect that is multiplied through a coordination motive. We show that the total effect can be large even if the direct social learning effect is small. We apply our results to the diffusion of products with network externalities and the onset of social movements.

Keywords: voting; coordination; experts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-net and nep-pol
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Related works:
Journal Article: Influential Opinion Leaders (2014)
Working Paper: Influential Opinion Leaders (2010)
Working Paper: Influential Opinion Leaders (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp458

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