Informational Externalities and Convergence of Behavior

The dissemination of private information, or knowledge, in a population has attracted much interest, first among sociologists and geographers (see references in Chamley (2004)), and more recently among economists and computer scientists. A question that has attracted a lot of attention is whether as time passes, information spreads through the entire population, and beliefs become more precise, consensus of some sort eventually arises. Within economics, this work has developed independently in different directions, and several strands of literature can be recast under that heading. In the literature on getting to common knowledge, agents are endowed with private information over the underlying state of the world, and exchange information according to some communication protocol. This main purpose of this literature, starting with Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1982), is to

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