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Do Information Cascades Arise Easier under Time Pressure? Experimantal Approach.
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this paper I attempt to model propensity to herd and infer its relationship to time-pressure by conducting a laboratory experiment. I let subjects perform a simple cognitive task under different treatment conditions and levels of time pressure with the possibility to herd. The order of decision-making is endogenous and the task is not probabilistic. Rather, I impose uncertainty of private signal by different levels of time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others. Apart from that I examine the effect of reputation (also called endorsement effect) as an addition to the public pool of information, which is expected to increase the probability to herd. The main findings are that propensity to herd was not significantly influenced by different levels of time pressure. Information cascades arose, but never in a perfect form. Personality traits measured by the Big Five protocol contribute considerably to the explanation of the model, but their relationship is not straightforward. Heart-rate increased during performance of a task, but was not correlated to subjectively stated...
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Does the probability to herd decrease when decisions are of higher importance? Experimental Approach
Kočová, Alžběta ; Cingl, Lubomír (advisor) ; Maršál, Aleš (referee)
In this thesis I study the effect of decision importance on propensity to engage in herding behaviour and what is bounded rational, optimal, utility maximizing strategy for agents. In the beginning, prior literature on herding behaviour and decision importance is reviewed. The only research connecting these two issues was done in psychology. Therefore a comparison and critique of psychological research versus experimental economics is provided in the methodological part. The main part of this thesis is designing an experiment aimed at differentiation of the propensity to engage in herding behaviour with respect to the importance of the decisions being made. People decide in a cascade among two option according to signals obtained. Eight different treatments are run, each with different size of monetary reward as a motivation. Everyone gets two signals, one private and one public. In situations when these signals are contradictory and of the same informativeness, decisions are measured and compared among treatments. Main hypothesis is that people are less likely to be influenced by other people's decisions as the task importance rises. Also data analysis is outlined. JEL Classification C92 Keywords Herding behaviour, informational cascades, importance, experimental economics Author's e-mail...
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Do Information Cascades Arise Easier under Time Pressure? Experimantal Approach.
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this paper I attempt to model propensity to herd and infer its relationship to time-pressure by conducting a laboratory experiment. I let subjects perform a simple cognitive task under different treatment conditions and levels of time pressure with the possibility to herd. The order of decision-making is endogenous and the task is not probabilistic. Rather, I impose uncertainty of private signal by different levels of time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others. Apart from that I examine the effect of reputation (also called endorsement effect) as an addition to the public pool of information, which is expected to increase the probability to herd. The main findings are that propensity to herd was not significantly influenced by different levels of time pressure. Information cascades arose, but never in a perfect form. Personality traits measured by the Big Five protocol contribute considerably to the explanation of the model, but their relationship is not straightforward. Heart-rate increased during performance of a task, but was not correlated to subjectively stated...
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