Much natural learning occurs by observation without explicit feedback or tutaring, yet few models of learning address this class of tasks. Further, many natural cases of observational learning are complex, ond efficient learning seems to demand strategic learning procedures. The present work adopts o design perspective and asks what learning mechanisms would be both useful and feasible for natu...

We propose a simple model in which an agent observes not only the choices made by others, but also some information about the process that led them to those choices. We consider two cases: In the first, an agent observes whether another agent has compared the alternatives before making his choice. In the second, an agent observes the time invested in deliberation before the other agent makes hi...

An extensive literature identifies how privately-informed rational people who observe the behavior of other privately-informed rational people with similar tastes may come to imitate those people, emphasizing when and how such imitation leads to inefficiency. This paper investigates not the efficiency but instead the behavior of fully rational observational learners. In virtually any setting ap...

We study observational learning in environments with congestion costs: as more of one’s predecessors choose an action, the payoff from choosing that action decreases. Herds cannot occur if congestion on an action can get so large that an agent would prefer to take a different action no matter what his beliefs about the state. To the extent that “switching” away from the more popular action also...

Can observational learning be effector dependent? In 3 experiments, observers watched a model respond to a 6-item unique sequence in a serial reaction time task. Their sequence knowledge was then compared with that of controls who had performed an unrelated task or observed a model responding to random targets. Observational learning was indicated when the introduction of a new sequence was ass...

Recently, mobile applications have offered users the option to share their location information with friends. Using data from a major location-based social networking application in China (a Foursquare-like application), we estimate a structural model of restaurant discovery and observational learning. The unique feature of repeated customer visits in the data allows us to examine observational...

Individuals can learn by interacting with the environment and experiencing a difference between predicted and obtained outcomes (prediction error). However, many species also learn by observing the actions and outcomes of others. In contrast to individual learning, observational learning cannot be based on directly experienced outcome prediction errors. Accordingly, the behavioral and neural me...

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application‐specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies may be restricted take the of decision trees based on limited set easily observable individual characteristics. We propose new approach this problem motiv...