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30 août 2022
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Mots-clés
Economics - Theoretical EconomicsSujets proches
Fashion (Fad) Crazes Economic theory Political economyCiter ce document
Wanying Huang, « The Emergence of Fads in a Changing World », arXiv - économie
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Résumé
We study how fads emerge from social learning in a changing environment. We consider a sequential learning model in which rational agents arrive in order, each acting only once, and the underlying unknown state is constantly evolving. Each agent receives a private signal, observes all past actions of others, and chooses an action to match the current state. Since the state changes over time, cascades cannot last forever, and actions fluctuate too. We show that in the long run, actions change more often than the state. This describes many real-life faddish behaviors in which people often change their actions more frequently than what is necessary.