Social Learning of General Rules

Abstract: Why do agents adopt a particular general behavioral rule among a collection of possible alternatives? To address this question, we introduce a dynamic social learning framework, where agents rely on general rules of thumb and imitate the behavioral rules of successful peers. We find the social learning outcome can be characterized independent of the initial rule distribution. When one dominant general rule consistently yields superior problem-specific outcomes, social learning almost surely leads all agents to adopt this dominant rule; otherwise, provided the population is sufficiently large, the better rule for the more frequent problem becomes the consensus rule with arbitrarily high probability. As a result, the behavioral rule selected by the social learning process need not maximize social welfare. We complement our theoretical analysis with an application to the market sentiment selection in a stochastic production market.