Optimal Design for Social Learning
Yeon-Koo Che,Johannes Hörner +1 more
TLDR
This paper studies the design of a recommender system for organizing social learning on a product and finds that fully transparent recommendations may become optimal if a (socially-benevolent) designer does not observe the agents’ costs of experimentation.Abstract:
This paper studies the design of a recommender system for organizing social learning on a product. To improve incentives for early experimentation, the optimal design trades off fully transparent social learning by over-recommending a product (or “spamming”) to a fraction of agents in the early phase of the product cycle. Under the optimal scheme, the designer spams very little about a product right after its release but gradually increases the frequency of spamming and stops it altogether when the product is deemed sufficiently unworthy of recommendation. The optimal recommender system involves randomly triggered spamming when recommendations are public—as is often the case for product ratings—and an information “blackout” followed by a burst of spamming when agents can choose when to check in for a recommendation. Fully transparent recommendations may become optimal if a (socially-benevolent) designer does not observe the agents’ costs of experimentation.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Incentivizing exploration via information asymmetry
TL;DR: As self-interested individuals make decisions over time, they utilize information revealed by others in the past and produce information that may help them in the future.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
The Perils of Exploration under Competition: A Computational Modeling Approach
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors empirically study the interplay between exploration and competition and find that duopoly and monopoly tend to favor a primitive greedy algorithm that does not explore and leads to low consumer welfare, whereas a temporary monopoly with an early entrant may incentivize better bandit algorithms and lead to higher consumer welfare.
Journal ArticleDOI
How to Persuade a Long-Run Decision Maker
TL;DR: It is shown that, with a deadline by which the receiver must act, for intermediate precision of the news the sender generates information in dribs and drabs, and more precise news can improve the welfare of the sender even though better news means the sender loses control over the flow of information.
Posted Content
Innovation Adoption by Forward-Looking Social Learners
Mira Frick,Yuhta Ishii +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze how the potential for social learning in an economy aects consumers' informational incentives and how these in turn shape the aggregate adoption dynamics of an innovation.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Designing Informative Rating Systems: Evidence from an Online Labor Market
Nikhil Garg,Ramesh Johari +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a randomized controlled trial on an online labor market was conducted, where an additional question was added to the feedback form and the question phrasing and answer choices were varied between treatment conditions, and the treatment conditions included several positive-skewed verbal rating scales with descriptive phrases or adjectives providing specific interpretation for each rating level.
References
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Posted Content
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