OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Agents learn about a state using private signals and the past actions of their neighbors in a network. In contrast to most such models, the target being learned about is moving around. We ask: when can a group aggregate information quickly, keeping up with the changing environment? First, if private signals are diverse enough in their precisions, then Bayesian learning achieves good information aggregation as long as individuals observe sufficiently many others. Second, without diversity in signal distributions, Bayesian information aggregation can fall far short of good aggregation benchmarks, and even be Pareto-inefficient. Third, good aggregation requires anti-imitation; without it, agents’ estimates are inefficiently confounded by “echoes” of past perceptions. At a technical level, stationary equilibria of Bayesian learning are characterized by linear rules reminiscent of the simple DeGroot heuristic, with coefficients satisfying a certain system of equations. The resulting tractability can facilitate structural estimation of equilibrium learning models and testing against behavioral alternatives, as well as the analysis of welfare and influence.