Naive Learning with Uninformed Agents

Learning from friends and neighbors is one of the most common ways in which new ideas and ideas about new products get disseminated. There are two aspects of social learning. First of all, diffusion models describe how information spreads from a small set of agents to the wider population of uninformed agents (Calvo-Armengol and Jackson, 2004; Jackson and Yariv, 2007; Banerjee et al., 2013). Informed agents in these models typically all have the same information and the analysis is focused on describing the diffusion patterns as uninformed agents gradually learn about the existence of the new product or service. Second, information aggregation models describe how rational or boundedly rational agents aggregate different signals (Bala and Goyal, 2000; DeMarzo et al., 2003). In these models, every agent is typically informed and the analysis is focused on how quickly agents converge to a limit opinion (if any).