On Non-Bayesian Social Learning

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a social learning model where agents iteratively update beliefs through private signals and neighbor interactions, demonstrating conditions for correct learning and consensus without assuming informative signals.

Contribution

It establishes minimal conditions for agents to learn the true state and reach consensus in a non-Bayesian social learning framework.

Findings

Agents eventually forecast the true state correctly.

Beliefs converge to consensus under minimal conditions.

Learning occurs without requiring private signals to be individually informative.

Abstract

We study a model of information aggregation and social learning recently proposed by Jadbabaie, Sandroni, and Tahbaz-Salehi, in which individual agents try to learn a correct state of the world by iteratively updating their beliefs using private observations and beliefs of their neighbors. No individual agent's private signal might be informative enough to reveal the unknown state. As a result, agents share their beliefs with others in their social neighborhood to learn from each other. At every time step each agent receives a private signal, and computes a Bayesian posterior as an intermediate belief. The intermediate belief is then averaged with the belief of neighbors to form the individual's belief at next time step. We find a set of minimal sufficient conditions under which the agents will learn the unknown state and reach consensus on their beliefs without any assumption on the private signal structure. The key enabler is a result that shows that using this update, agents will eventually forecast the indefinite future correctly.