Essays on Behavioral Economics with Information Orientation

Behavioral economics tries to understand the impact of decision process on economic behaviors and outcomes. Utilizing theoretical lenses of psychology and economics, my dissertation, composed of four essays, studies the behavioral pattern of individuals and groups to tell philosophies behind some interesting phenomena, such as reciprocity in developing social relations, information externality in queues, probable dominance of collectively bad decisions, the contradicting behavioral pattern of leaders and followers when facing bad choices, and etc.;In my first essay entitled "Social Capital and Telecom Churn: Reciprocity in Mobile Telecom Networks", I empirically examine the role of reciprocity in the development of social relations. Based on multiple dimensions of social capital, e.g., network connectivity, social tie strength, internal network ratio, and reciprocity, I develop a method to predict telecom churns. The algorithm is based on social capital derived from historical usage patterns and service status, thus it is easy to be implemented with customer database.;In my second essay entitled "A Model of Information Aggregation in Sequential Moves", I investigate sequential learning process and propose a mathematical model that measure information aggregation and evaluate the stability of informational cascades with a multistage decision process. The results capture two primary behavioral aspect of informational cascade: information aggregation and diminishing sensitivity.;In my third essay entitled "Social Learning and the Wisdom of Crowd: Simultaneous Moves in Network", I investigate the phenomenon of social contagion through learning strategies among individuals in the network. This network-based simultaneous learning process is simulated via computer programme to seek insights on the effect of simultaneous learning on collective and individual actions. Through numerical experiment, it demonstrats that learning in network can be effective while bad decisions have chance to dominate, and there is a threshold for collective decision quality.;In my forth essay entitled "Learning in Social Media: Social Cues and Decision Biases", I investigate the effect of learning strategy in the context of social media with internet usage dataset collected by web crawler. This study demonstrates that choices based on social cues dominate for popular products, and it exaggerates the inequality among products. Besides, two types of asymmetries exist for social cues: (1) Asymmetric sensitivity for immediate and accumulative changes in social learning process; and (2) Asymmetric behavioral pattern in providing WOMs for leaders and followers. These findings suggest that social cues may be biased.