Social Learning with Costly Search
研究了代理人通过昂贵搜索私下获取信息的序列社会学习模型，发现当搜索成本不远离零时渐近学习发生，并刻画了两行动情形下的均衡与社会福利收敛条件。
We study a sequential social learning model where agents privately acquire information by costly search. Search costs of agents are private, and are independently and identically distributed. We show that asymptotic learning occurs if and only if search costs are not bounded away from zero. We explicitly characterize equilibria for the case of two actions, and show that the probability of late moving agents taking the suboptimal action vanishes at a linear rate. Social welfare converges to the social optimum as the discount rate converges to one if and only if search costs are not bounded away from zero.