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Ignacio Monzón
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Aggregate Uncertainty Can Lead to Herds
This Version: April 2008 / First Version: December 2006
Abstract
This paper presents a model in which homogeneous rational agents
choose between two competing technologies. Agents observe a private
signal and a sample of other agents' previous choices. The signal
has both an idiosyncratic and an aggregate component of uncertainty.
I derive the optimal decision rule when each agent observes the
decision of exactly two agents. Due to aggregate uncertainty,
aggregate behavior does not necessarily reflect the true state of
nature. Nonetheless, agents still find others' choices a good source
of information, and they base their decisions partly on the behavior
of others. Consequently, bad choices can be perpetuated in this
environment: I show that aggregate uncertainty can lead to agents
herding on the inferior technology with positive probability. I also
present examples in which herding occurs for arbitrarily large
sample sizes.