ENDOGENOUS TIMING AND THE CLUSTERING OF AGENTS DECISIONS

This paper presents a model in which agents choose an action and a tim e at which to take the action. We show that when agents choose when to act, their decisions become clustered together, giving the appearance of an information cascade, even though information is actually being used efficiently. This occurs because the passage of time allows the f irst acting agent to anticipate something about the second agent's inf ormation, and for a large class of delay cost functions, the equilibri um orders agents in such a way that the most extreme information is re vealed first.