Who Enters the Record ? Paywalls, Contributor Selection, and Social Learning

Maria Kovalenko and Georgy Lukyanov
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Maria Kovalenko: Unknown
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

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Abstract: This paper studies social learning when buying access to previous decisions also determines whose decision enters the record. Individuals first receive private information and then decide whether to pay for access. A positive price selects relatively weak private beliefs. With one founding observation, every buyer copies it, and the record acquires no further information. With a richer initial history, buyers can disagree and the record can improve; nevertheless, a price bounded away from zero prevents complete learning, even with unbounded private beliefs. We then consider a rule under which a buyer makes a preliminary choice before access and a revised choice afterward. A positive probability of implementing the preliminary choice makes it follow the private signal. Retaining both choices restores complete learning under a fixed effective fee or pooled myopic pricing, including with bounded beliefs. The rule reduces willingness to pay and sacrifices some current decision accuracy. A worked example shows how the subsequent improvement in information can outweigh both initial losses. The results show why preserving a judgment made before exposure can change what later users learn from the same selected population.

Keywords: social learning; costly observation; contributor selection; independent judgments; information cascades (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10-30
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