Learning Dynamics and Support for Economic Reforms: Why Good News Can Be Bad
研究揭示经济改革中公众支持动态的悖论：成功起步的改革常失去支持。通过无放回抽样的学习动态解释这一现象，并分析为何渐进改革在中国有效，而在拉美和中东欧效果不佳。
Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. We show that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement. We show that this concept challenges the conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing reform winners. It may also lead to situations in which reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support will still not come to completion. We use our framework to explain why gradual reforms worked well in China (where successes in Special Economic Zones facilitated further reform), whereas this was much less the case for Latin American and Central and Eastern European countries.