Communication With Unknown Perspectives

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Sethi, Rajiv; Yildiz, Muhamet
• 署名单位: Columbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: ECONOMETRICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0012-9682
• DOI: 10.3982/ECTA13320
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 2029-2069
• 关键词: Social networks; simple-model; opinions

摘要

Consider a group of individuals with unobservable perspectives (subjective prior beliefs) about a sequence of states. In each period, each individual receives private information about the current state and forms an opinion (a posterior belief). She also chooses a target individual and observes the target's opinion. This choice involves a trade-off between well-informed targets, whose signals are precise, and well-understood targets, whose perspectives are well known. Opinions are informative about the target's perspective, so observed individuals become better understood over time. We identify a simple condition under which long-run behavior is history independent. When this fails, each individual restricts attention to a small set of experts and observes the most informed among these. A broad range of observational patterns can arise with positive probability, including opinion leadership and information segregation. In an application to areas of expertise, we show how these mechanisms generate own field bias and large field dominance.