时间：10月30日（周四）10:30 a.m.-12:00

地点：北京大学经济学院302

主持老师：吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；胡岠（国发院）

参与老师：胡涛，吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；汪浩，胡岠，邢亦青（国发院）；翁翕，刘烁（光华）

主讲人：吕辰（北京大学汇丰商学院助理教授）

题目: Information Design for Social Learning with Patient Agents

摘要：

Sequentially coming agents may adopt a new technology. Early adoption can generate information about its value, which is either high or low, and an intermediary decides how such information will be dynamically published. Because individuals tend to wait and free-ride on information generated by others, efficient social learning is hard to achieve. Facing this challenge, we study how the intermediary can improve social welfare by designing its information publishing policy. To incentivize early adoption, we show it is optimal to restrain future information flow via inducing individually sub-optimal adoption but not via excessive waiting. The optimal design features a simple threshold stopping structure: in every period, recommend adoption if the intermediary’s current belief is more optimistic than a threshold; otherwise, recommend waiting forever. While the first-best design uses a constant threshold, the optimal design features time-varying thresholds that typically cross the first-best one. We also examine special cases where learning is via conclusive news. In good-news environments, the optimal design needs to involve a middle phase in which exploration is randomly terminated; in bad-news environments, adoption may be continued even if bad news has arrived. These serve to mitigate the individuals’ incentive problem efficiently.

主讲人介绍：吕辰现为北京大学汇丰商学院助理教授。主要从事信息经济学相关的应用微观理论研究，重点关注信息设计及其在产业组织、平台推荐等方面的应用。研究成果发表于Journal of Economic Theory。