Informational externalities and emergence of consensus

Nicolas Vieille (1) , Eilon Solan (2) , Dinah Rosenberg (3, 4)

1 GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC
2 TAU - Tel Aviv University
3 LAGA - Laboratoire Analyse, Géométrie et Applications
4 CECO - Laboratoire d'économétrie de l'École polytechnique

We study a general model of dynamic games with purely informational externalities. We prove that eventually all motives for experimentation disappear, and provide the exact rate at which experimentation decays. We also provide tight conditions under which players eventually reach a consensus. These results imply extensions of many known results in the literature of social learning and getting to agreement.

Keywords: Consensus; Informational externalities

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance; Economy and decision science

Nicolas Vieille, Eilon Solan, Dinah Rosenberg. Informational externalities and emergence of consensus. Games and Economic Behavior / Games and Economic Behaviour, 2009, Vol.66,n°2, pp.979-994. ⟨10.1016/j.geb.2008.09.027⟩. ⟨hal-00464565⟩