Learning to import from your peers

Learning from Peers

In this paper we study the impact of peers on coworker learning in a retail setting. Using four years of individual cosmetic sales data from a Chinese department store, we incorporate peer-based learning into a model with learning-by-doing and forgetting. We observe peer-based learning both within and across firm boundaries, identifying that the relative ability of coworkers impacts salesperson...

Active Learning from Peers

This paper addresses the challenge of learning from peers in an online multitask setting. Instead of always requesting a label from a human oracle, the proposed method first determines if the learner for each task can acquire that label with sufficient confidence from its peers either as a task-similarity weighted sum, or from the single most similar task. If so, it saves the oracle query for l...

Learning from your patients.

Win-stay, lose-shift in language learning from peers.

Traditional language learning theory explores an idealized interaction between a teacher and a learner. The teacher provides sentences from a language, while the learner has to infer the underlying grammar. Here, we study a new approach by considering a population of individuals that learn from each other. There is no designated teacher. We are inspired by the observation that children grow up ...

Learning from Peers: Knowledge Transfer and Sales Force Productivity Growth

We study how peers impact worker productivity growth among salespeople in the cosmetics department of a department store. We first exploit a shift assignment policy that creates exogenous variation in salespersons’ peers each week to identify and quantify sources of worker learning. We find that peer-based learning is more important than learning-by-doing for individuals, and find no evidence o...