We investigate a toy model of inductive interacting agents aiming to forecast a continuous, exogenous random variable E. Private information on E is spread heterogeneously across agents. Herding turns out to be the preferred forecasting mechanism when heterogeneity is maximal. However in such conditions aggregating information e ciently is hard even in the presence of learning, as the herding r...

Title of dissertation: ESSAYS ON MUTUAL FUNDS Nitin Kumar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Russ Wermers Department of Finance Robert H. Smith School of Business This dissertation comprises of three essays on mutual funds. In the first essay, I test whether fund investors rationally incorporate portfolio manager ownership disclosure in their portfolio allocation de...

This paper proposes methods for achieving basic tasks such as navigation, patrolling, herding, and coverage by exploiting the wild motions of very simple bodies in the environment. Bodies move within regions that are connected by gates that enforce specific rules of passage. Common issues such as dynamical system modeling, precise state estimation, and state feedback are avoided. The method is ...

The system mentioned in the title belongs to the family of the so-called massively multi-player online social games (MMOSG). It features a scoring system for the elements of the game that is prone to herding effects. We analyze in detail its stationary regime in the thermodynamic limit, when the number of players tends to infinity. In particular, for some classes of input sequences and selectio...

Byoung-Tak Zhang Dept. of Computer Engineering Seoul National University Seoul 151-7 42, Korea [email protected] We study the evolution of herding behavior of multiple autonomous mobile robotic agents. Agents are cloned to form a homogeneous team. Cooperation strategies for a team of the robots are represented in a neural network. An evolutionary algorithm is used to evolve the neural netw...

Honor cultures have often been associated with herding societies in the anthropological literature. This has led Nisbett and Cohen (1996) to conflate the honor psychology they describe in their book Culture of Honor with the pastoral personality that was documented in earlier anthropological studies of herding societies. I argue that although honor psychology and pastoral personality appear ver...

This paper investigates how friendship relationships act as pipes, prisms, and herding signals in a large online, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site. By analyzing decisions of lenders, we find that friends of the borrower, especially close offline friends, act as financial pipes by lending money to the borrower. On the other hand, the prism effect of friends’ endorsements via bidding on a loan neg...

In this paper we extend the herding attacks for concatenated hash functions, i.e., hash functions of the form h(x) = h1(x)||h2(x). Our results actually apply a much larger set of hash functions. We show that even when the compression function of h(·) can be written as two (or more) data paths, where one data path is not affected by the second (while the second may depend on the first), then the...

We characterize optimal strategies in a simple herding model where observations have a small cost. We assume that there are two states and two possible signals that each agent may get. The prior distribution is biased towards adopting behavior. That is ex-ante adopting gives a higher expected utility than not adopting. Contrary to Kultti & Miettinen (2005) herding does not arise deterministical...

This paper demonstrates that the behavior of institutional investors around the downturn of the U.S. equity markets in 2007 is consistent with stochastic herding in attempts to time the market. We consider a model of large number of institutional investment managers who simultaneously decide whether to remain invested in an assets or liquidate their positions. Each fund manager receives imperfe...