Updating ambiguous beliefs in a social learning experiment

Roberta De Filippis, Antonio Guarino, Philippe Jehiel () and Toru Kitagawa ()
Additional contact information
Roberta De Filippis: Institute for Fiscal Studies
Toru Kitagawa: Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London

No CWP18/16, CeMMAP working papers from Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract: We present a novel experimental design to study social learning in the laboratory. Subjects have to predict the value of a good in a sequential order. We elicit each subject’s belief twice: first (“prior belief”), after he observes his predecessors’ action; second (“posterior belief”), after he observes a private signal on the value of the good. We are therefore able to disentangle social learning from learning from a private signal. Our main result is that subjects update on their private signal in an asymmetric way. They weigh the private signal as a Bayesian agent would do when the signal confirms their prior belief; they overweight the signal when it contradicts their prior belief. We show that this way of updating, incompatible with Bayesianism, can be explained by ambiguous beliefs (multiple priors on the predecessor’s rationality) and a generalization of the Maximum Likelihood Updating rule.

Keywords: Social; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/cemmap/wps/cwp181616.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/cemmap/wps/cwp181616.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/cemmap/wps/cwp181616.pdf [302 Found]--> https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/cemmap/wps/cwp181616.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Updating ambiguous beliefs in a social learning experiment (2017)
Working Paper: Updating ambiguous beliefs in a social learning experiment (2017)
Working Paper: Updating ambiguous beliefs in a social learning experiment (2016)
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:ifs:cemmap:18/16

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeMMAP working papers from Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emma Hyman ().