Using Response Times to Infer Others’ Private Information: An Application to Information Cascades

Abstract

The standard assumption in social learning environments is that agents can only learn from others through choice outcomes. We argue that agents can also infer information from others’ choice processes. We conduct an information-cascade experiment where we manipulate subjects’ ability to observe others’ response times (RTs) as they make publicly observable decisions. We find that RTs contain information that is not contained in choice outcomes and that subjects are naturally able to correctly infer others’ private information from the RTs. Our results suggest that in environments where RTs are publicly available, the information structure may be richer than previously thought.