Seminario CEDE - Ricardo Fonseca
Ricardo Fonseca.
A farmer considering a new perennial crop, or someone considering a new vaccine, may prefer to wait and learn from others’ experience. I show that publicly committing to a temporary pause in access can accelerate adoption: some agents adopt earlier, and their experience informs those who wait. I characterize the access calendar that reaches an adoption target as soon as possible, for general smooth distributions of good-state payoffs. A pause must last long enough to keep early adopters from waiting until reopening. Each pause is compared with the gradual adoption it replaces. These time effects add across nonoverlapping pauses, so the optimal calendar selects the pauses that together save the most time. Continuous access until a final round is optimal when the payoff density is nonincreasing, whereas sufficiently strong local concentration can make pauses beneficial. For a fixed adoption population, faster completion need not raise welfare: a pause induces some agents to bear the risks of earlier experimentation and makes others wait longer. Heterogeneity in prior beliefs is equivalent to payoff heterogeneity, allowing the principal to use data on beliefs or gains to choose access dates.