REP Research Seminar - Presenting in person - Dr Min Zhang. Title: Does public information help social learning: postponing and anti-transparency

These are primarily internal Seminars but if you are interested in attending one of our Seminars or for further information, please contact: REPSchoolOffice@henley.ac.uk

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of releasing exogenous public information in rational social-learning models that predicts informational cascades and incomplete learning. Despite the fact that informational cascades can be triggered by incorrect early actions, we show that, to improve social learning, it is better to postpone the disclosure of public information in a canonical setting with binary states and actions. More importantly, it is suboptimal to ever release public information less precise than people's private information even through contingent disclosure strategies, since noisy public signals crowd out more informative private signals and thus harm information aggregation. In other words, anti-transparency turns out to be the correct public information policy for social learning when public information is relatively coarse.

Bio: I work as a lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics, University of St Andrews Business School. I have been working there since I finished my PhD at the London School of Economics. My primary research field is microeconomic theory, with a particular focus on social learning and its applications to other theoretical framework such as in auctions and elections.