Communication With Unknown Perspectives
研究一群持有未知主观先验信念的个体如何通过观察他人观点来学习，揭示了长期行为历史独立的条件，以及当条件不满足时，个体如何聚焦于少数专家并导致意见领袖和信息隔离现象。
Consider a group of individuals with unobservable perspectives (subjective prior beliefs) about a sequence of states. In each period, each individual receives private information about the current state and forms an opinion (a posterior belief). She also chooses a target individual and observes the target's opinion. This choice involves a trade‐off between well‐informed targets, whose signals are precise, and well‐understood targets, whose perspectives are well known. Opinions are informative about the target's perspective, so observed individuals become better understood over time. We identify a simple condition under which long‐run behavior is history independent. When this fails, each individual restricts attention to a small set of experts and observes the most informed among these. A broad range of observational patterns can arise with positive probability, including opinion leadership and information segregation. In an application to areas of expertise, we show how these mechanisms generate own field bias and large field dominance.