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Models of herd behavior and informational cascades often make strong assumptions about the information available to agents, the nature of the choices being made, the timing of decisions, and the symmetry of equilibrium. This note considers the robustness of some results from the literature on social learning and argues that the inefficiency of equilibrium in the presence of informational externalities and strategic delay may be the most important lesson of all.
An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual with regard to his own information. The authors argue that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades. Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.
The paper shows how career concerns rather than effort aversion can induce a natural incongruity in risk preferences between
managers and superiors. A model, based on learning about managerial talent, is developed to study second-best contractual
remedies. We show that the optimal wage contract is an option of the value of the manager's human capital for insurance reasons
and that consequently rationing of capital is often required to counterbalance the manager's resulting incentive to overinvest.
Rationing is strictly superior to price decentralization, offering one reason for the prevalence of centralized capital budgeting
procedures.
This article analyzes a technology adoption process in which the effect of informational spillover interacts with network externalities. The interplay of informational externalities and payoff interdependency induces risk-averse and clustering behavior in the technology-adoption process. The analysis differs from the herd behavior literature in focusing on how the herd behavior of subsequent users influences the initial adoption decision. Moreover, herd behavior in this article stems from each agent's desire to inhibit the revelation of new information that can be used in a way detrimental to her, rather than from each agent's effort to free-ride on information contained in the decisions made by predecessors.
This paper briefly describes recent papers on the economics of rational herding in financial markets. Some models can predict perfect herding, in which rational agents all act alike without any countervailing force. Such herding typically arises either from direct payoff externalities (negative externalities in bank runs; positive externalities in the generation of trading liquidity or in information acquisition), principal-agent problems (based on managerial desire to protect or signal reputation), or informational learning (cascades). The paper also provides a few pointers to related literature and suggests issues to be addressed in future research.
This paper presents a model in which agents choose an action and a time at which to take the action. The authors show that, when agents choose when to act, their decisions become clustered together, giving the appearance of an information cascade even though information is actually being used efficiently. This occurs because the passage of time allows the first acting agent to anticipate something about the second agent's information and, for a large class of delay cost functions, the equilibrium orders agents in such a way that the most extreme information is revealed first. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.
The author analyzes a sequential decision model in which each decisionmaker looks at the decisions made by previous decisionmakers in taking her own decision. This is rational for her because these other decisionmakers may have some information that is important for her. The author then shows that the decision rules that are chosen by optimizing individuals will be characterized by herd behavior; i.e., people will be doing what others are doing rather than using their information. The author then shows that the resulting equilibrium is inefficient. Copyright 1992, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Short-lived agents want to predict a random variable and have to decide how much effort to devote to collect private information and consequently how much to rely on public information. The latter is just a noisy average of past predictions. It is shown that costly information acquisition prevents an unbounded accumulation of public information if (and only if) the marginal cost to acquire information is positive at zero . When public precision at period n, , tends to infinity with n but the rate of convergence of public information to is slowed down with respect to the exogenous information case. At the market outcome agents acquire too little private information. This happens either with respect to a (decentralized) first best benchmark or, for n large, with respect to a (decentralized) second best benchmark. For high discount factors the limit point of market public precision always falls short of the welfare benchmarks whenever . In the extreme, as the discount factor tends to one public precision tends to infinity in the welfare-optimal programs while it remains bounded at the market solution. Otherwise, if public precision accumulates in an unbounded way both at the first and second best solutions. More public information may hurt at either the market or second best solutions.
I study the phenomenon of herd behavior in a framework where agents can endogenously choose both the actions and the timing of their actions. I assume that agents may have privately known quality and content of information. A unique symmetric equilibrium in pure strategies is proved to exist and characterized in its closed form. An investment cascade always occurs in the equilibrium, and a strategic delay is shown to exist before the sudden onset of the investment cascade. I also examine the loss of welfare from delay and information cascade
In this article I identify optimal incentive contracts for managers of firms competing in the product market. Such firms often
confront similar decisions and uncertainties. Managers can improve decision quality by generating private signals through
costly effort. However, since signals are likely to be correlated, firms that decide later get additional information from
the actions of earlier firms. This impacts effort choice. Decision quality is also affected if later managers disregard their
own signals and blindly imitate preceding decisions. In a competitive environment, such cascading hurts profits. Contracts
that solve both moral hazard and cascading problems typically put more weight on firm profits, making them expensive. Contacts
with more weight on decision quality are less expensive but result in cascades. Shareholders choose contracts that maximize
their net surplus. This results in testable implications about which industries may have more convergence in investment choices,
greater pay-for-profit sensitivity, larger differences in observed contracts, more innovation, larger-size firms, and potential
for overcompensation.
This review examines the incentives of managers to use investment choices as a tool for building their personal reputations or the reputation of their firms. These incentives come in three main forms: visibility bias, which encourages a manager to try to make short-term indicators of success look better; resolution reference which encourages a manager to try to advance the arrival of good news and delay bad news; and mimicry and avoidence, which encourages a manager to take the actions that the best managers are seen to do, and to avoid the actions the worst managers are seen to do.
The authors characterize the symmetric equilibria of an investment game with a pure informational externality. When the period length is very short, the game ends very quickly; with positive probability, an informational cascade (herding) causes an investment collapse. As the period length increases, the possibility of herding disappears. As the number of players increases, the rate of investment and the information flow are eventually independent of the number of players; adding more players simply increases the number who delay. In the limit, a period of low investment is followed by either an investment surge or a collapse. Copyright 1994 by The Econometric Society.