Using Response Times to Infer Others’ Private Information: An Application to Information Cascades
通过信息级联实验发现，反应时间包含选择结果未揭示的私人信息，当反应时间可观察时，受试者能提取这些信息并更可能打破错误级联。
The standard assumption in social learning environments is that agents learn from others through choice outcomes. We argue that in many settings, agents can also infer information from others’ response times (RT), which can increase efficiency. To investigate this, we conduct a standard information cascade experiment and find that RTs do contain information that is not revealed by choice outcomes alone. When RTs are observable, subjects extract this private information and are more likely to break from incorrect cascades. Our results suggest that in environments where RTs are publicly available, the information structure may be richer than previously thought. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.