Learning about informativeness

Abstract

We study whether individuals can learn the informativeness of their information technology through social learning. As in the classic sequential social learning model, rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their private signals. There is uncertainty regarding the informativeness of the common signal-generating process. We show that in this setting asymptotic learning about informativeness is not guaranteed and depends crucially on the relative tail distributions of private beliefs induced by uninformative and informative signals. We identify the phenomenon of perpetual disagreement as the cause of learning and characterize learning in the canonical Gaussian environment.