Speaker:ZhenZhou(Assistant Professor, PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University)
Description:This paper studies a collective decision-making scheme: each agent pays a fixed cost to participate in a project and receives a common value, only if the number of participantssurpasses a pre-specified threshold. When each agent has some dispersed private knowledge about this common value (individual wisdom) and makes the participation decision simultaneously, we find information aggregation is not efficient. In the unique monotone equilibrium, agents choose to participate even when their private information indicates otherwise. As such, some projects with value lower than the participation cost get initiated. We extend the model to show that this bias cannot be corrected when agents play the game dynamically with opportunities to learn from the past history of participation. We further apply the insights from our theory to three applications, namely, the All-or-Noting crowdfunding, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending, and excludable public good provision.
Time:Nov25, 2020(Wednesday),13:30-15:00
Venue:Tencent meeting RoomID:724 498 620