Effort without Evidence

Georgy Lukyanov
Additional contact information
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: Success under a demanding method does not show that its additional demands are worthwhile. I study this distinction in a model of intergenerational learning with hidden effort. Moderate effort is informative about the value of a less demanding method; high effort produces more successes but no information about that question. I first characterize efficient experimentation with a complete record. I then show that parents who underweight descendants' effort costs can induce earlier retirement from experimentation. On an explicit region of priors, a paternalistic equilibrium stops after one failed experiment, whereas an aligned equilibrium allows two. Both transmit the relevant record truthfully and withstand communication deviations: every sender already obtains its preferred full-record continuation. Nevertheless, paternalism lowers discounted material welfare, raises long-run effort and success, and leaves less informative public evidence. Under stronger paternalism, parents may instead conceal knowledge to induce experimentation. I characterize a pooling continuation, establish its local communication stability, and show that it can occur in a full equilibrium. The results distinguish the efficient limits to learning from the additional loss of evidence caused by disagreement over effort costs.

Keywords: social learning; effort; paternalism; intergenerational communication; experimentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05805552v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05805552v1/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-05805552

Access Statistics for this paper

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