Bayesian Learning in Social Networks
15Ilan Lobel (NYU)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/bayesian-learning-social-networks
Epidemics and Information Diffusion
This talk will revisit a 2011 Review of Economic Studies paper written with Daron Acemoglu, Munther Dahleh and Asuman Ozdaglar. We consider the canonical social learning model but where observations of past actions are constrained by a social network. The network is generated stochastically and neighborhoods can have arbitrary distributions. We are interested in what kinds of networks and signal structures lead to asymptotic learning (convergence in probability to the correct action). We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for asymptotic learning if signals are of unbounded strength, as well as network properties that allow learning irrespective of the signal structure.