Contrarian Motives in Social Learning

Vasilii Ivanik and Georgy Lukyanov
Additional contact information
Vasilii Ivanik: ICEF, NRU HSE - International College of Economics and Finance
Georgy Lukyanov: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, decides whether to acquire a private signal (and how precise it should be), and then chooses between two actions. Payoffs value correctness and include a bonus for taking the less popular action among pre-decessors; because this bonus depends only on observed popularity, the equilibrium analysis avoids fixed points in anticipated popularity and preserves standard Bayesian updating. In a Gaussian–quadratic setting, optimal actions follow posterior thresholds that tilt against the majority, and we solve the precision choice problem. Whenever the no-signal decision aligns with the observed majority, stronger contrarian motives weakly raise the value of information and expand the set of histories in which agents invest. We provide compact comparative statics for thresholds, action probabilities, and the precision argmax, a local welfare-and-information treatment, and applications to scientific priority races, cultural diffusion, and online platforms.

Keywords: Endogenous information acquisition; Nonconformity; Popularity; Bayesian thresholds; Information cascades; Social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10-17
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05319432v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05319432v1/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:hal-05319432

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().