Joyee Deb (Yale School of Management)

“#Change”

A change may be socially desirable but bringing about change involves costly action and enough people participating to take the costly action. If there is uncertainty about the desirability of change, access to more similar information may allow people to get more easily mobilized. But similar information can have two opposing effects: It can help coordination because now the beliefs of agents who are willing to participate, conditional on their own signal, point towards others doing the same. But it can cause free-riding: A high likelihood of many agents participating reduces the probability that anyone is pivotal, dampening the individual incentive for costly participation. We propose a new order of interdependence of information structures and use it to characterize when increased interdependence increases or reduces costly participation. We show that increasing interdependence is unambiguously good (bad) when bringing about change is hard (easy).