Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning

Drew Fudenberg and Glenn Ellison ()

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

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 (360)

Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3196300/fudenberg_word-of-mouth.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning (2010)
Journal Article: 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:hrv:faseco:3196300

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().