Interacting Cascades: An Experiment on Between-Group Information Spillovers

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an experiment on information spillovers between groups. We find that a player who is a member of multiple groups aggregates information and serves as a conduit through which information from one group spills over to another. We also find that such players are more influential than similarly situated players who are members of only a single group. We introduce a novel measure of the magnitude of information spillovers, and we identify the behavioral characteristics of the players that determine these magnitudes. While between-group spillovers occur, we find that their magnitudes are smaller than social learning theory predicts.