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Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning
Open accessAbstract
This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite the players' naive decision rules and the stochastic decision environment, word-of-mouth communication may lead all players to adopt the action that is on average superior. These socially efficient outcomes tend to occur when each agent samples only a few others.
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Citations
Cited by
The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews
Chevalier, J. A., & Mayzlin, D. (2006) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1509/jmkr.43.3.345 · Cited by 6,003
Participation in Heterogeneous Communities*
Alesina, A., & La Ferrara, E. (2000) · Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355300554935 · Cited by 1,864
Bayesian Learning in Social Networks
Acemoglu, D., Dahleh, M. A., Lobel, I., & Ozdaglar, A. (2011) · The Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1093/restud/rdr004 · Cited by 754
Opinion Dynamics and Learning in Social Networks
Acemoglu, D., & Ozdaglar, A. (2011) · Dynamic Games and Applications · doi:10.1007/s13235-010-0004-1 · Cited by 705
Political News in the News Feed: Learning Politics from Social Media
Bode, L. (2016) · Mass Communication and Society · doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045149 · Cited by 545
Metadata
- Authors
- Ellison, G., & Fudenberg, D.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1995-02-01
- Volume
- 110
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 93-125
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2122489728
- Cited by
- 894
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 16.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2118512
- The paper
- Ellison, G., & Fudenberg, D. (1995). Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/2118512
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
