Social Learning about Environmental Innovations: Experimental Analysis of Adoption Timing

Social learning about predators: does timing matter?

In Pavlovian conditioning, animals acquire a response to a previously neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS), such as a light, if that stimulus predicts a biologically important event (unconditioned stimulus, US), such as delivery of food. Learning typically occurs when the CS precedes the US (forward conditioning), and not when the CS follows the US (backward conditioning). In social lear...

The Spread of Innovations by Social Learning

The Timing of Social Learning

We consider a pure informational externalities environment in which agents make binary decisions. The agents are asymmetrically informed about a payoff-relevant state variable, and choose the timing of their decisions strategically. There is a delay cost that must be balanced against the possibility of learning from the announcements of predecessors. For two player games in discrete time, we sh...

social security payments and decision about timing of retirement: an economic analysis

0

What's social about social learning?

Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social...