Suchergebnisse

Experimental research found contradictory results regarding the occurrence of informational cascades. Whereas Anderson and Holt (1997) confirmed the model of Banerjee (1992), and Bikhchandani et al. (1992) through lab tests, Huck and Oechssler (2000) came to contradictory results on crucial issues. This article presents experimental evidence supporting further doubts concerning "Bayesian" informational cascades: Just under two thirds of all decisions are characterized by an excessive orientation towards the private signal, and only a small number of the subjects (<6%) make rational decisions systematically and consistently.

"Wir modellieren eine zweistufige dynamische Investitionsentscheidung mit
Informationsexternalitäten und 'Cheap Talk'. Dabei können wir zunächst zeigen,
dass die Glaubwürdigkeit von 'Cheap Talk'-Aussagen darunter leidet, wenn die
Investitionsentscheidung von solchen Informationen beeinflusst wird, die sich
eher aus dem Handeln der Mitakteure als durch ihre verbalen Bekundungen
ableiten. Dann zeigen wir, dass Informationskaskaden, die alle Akteure dieselbe
Handlung aufgrund öffentlicher Information ohne Berücksichtigung ihrer
privaten Informationen ausführen lassen, dazu führen, das Offenbaren der
wahren Präferenzen der Investoren – optimistisch oder pessimistisch -
anreizkompatibel zu machen. Vergleicht man Projekte mit niedrigen und hohen
Überschüssen, existiert ein Trenngleichgewicht nur bei letzteren, so dass
glaubwürdige Kommunikation eher über Worte als über Taten funktioniert. Will
ein sozialer Planer die Investitionsentscheidungen beeinflussen, kann er sowohl
durch eine Subventionierung als auch durch eine Besteuerung der Investitionen
die Wohlfahrt vergrößern." (Autorenreferat)

"Experimental research found contradictory results regarding the occurrence of Informational Cascades. While Anderson and Holt (1997) through lab tests confirm the model of Banerjee (1992), and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992) resp., Huck and Oechssler (2000) come to controversial results for crucial issues. This study is an extensive (227 test persons) and as regards contents expanded repetition. It becomes obvious that less than 10% of subjects are able to make deductions from predecessors' actions regarding their private signals, to consider the reliability of the signals and the a priory probability, to accurately use Bayes' Rule, and to thus reach rational decisions." (author's abstract)

"We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We implement a financial market with sequential trading and transaction costs in the laboratory. According to theory, eventually all traders neglect their private information and abstain from trading (i.e., a no-trade informational cascade occurs). We find that, in the experiment, informational no-trade cascades occur when theory predicts they should (i.e., when the trade imbalance is sufficiently high). At the same time, the proportion of subjects irrationally trading against their private information is smaller than in a financial market without transaction costs. As a result, the overall efficiency of the market is not significantly affected by the presence of transaction costs." [author's abstract]

This paper reports an experimental test of how individuals learn from the behavior of others. By using techniques only available in the laboratory, we elicit subjects' beliefs. This allows us to distinguish informational cascades from herd behavior. By adding a setup with continuous signal and discrete action, we enrich the ball-andurn observational learning experiments paradigm of Lisa R. Anderson and Charles Holt (1997). We attempt to understand subjects' behavior by estimating a model that allows for the possibility of errors in earlier decisions.

A theory is said to be fully absorbable whenever its own acceptance by all of the individuals belonging to a certain population does not question its predictive validity. This accounts for strategic equilibria and can be related to the logic underlying convergence of behaviour and intentional herding in sequential games. This paper discusses the absorbability of informational cascades' theory by bounded rational decision-makers and analyses whether providing individuals with theoretic information on informational cascades affects overall probability of herding phenomena to occur as well as whether an incorrect cascade can be reversed because of bounded rational adapting of the theory's prescriptive.

People memory system plays a key role in the decision‐making process (DMP). In order to examine its influence on decision‐making, an individual's memory‐based decision‐making system is developed, and then, we integrate the multi‐agent decision systems and construct a sequential risky decision model on the basis of an informational cascade. This study aims at exploring the public's decisions on whether or not to take protective actions under risk. The findings indicate that people with different strength of ties to friends and relatives make huge differences on decision‐making. In the group with weak ties, the agent's total size of decision information and the level of risk perception are reducing in the sequential decision process. We further prove that people with weak ties are more prone to take no protective action, and the probability is also decreasing with the decision turn. The sequence of people with strong ties makes decisions dynamically with the intensity of released information. Finally, the influences of forgetting rate and memory capacity on people's decision‐making are examined. The model provides a new line of thought about building a multi‐agent system of DMP, which is also very helpful for the design of an information management system during emergencies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.