Observational Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment
Hongbin Cai, Yuyu Chen and Hanming Fang run a randomised field experiment in a restaurant, designed to tell observational learning apart from a simple saliency effect. Showing diners a list of the five most popular dishes raised demand for those dishes, whereas showing only the names of sample dishes had no significant effect. The abstract reports modest evidence that the effect was stronger among infrequent customers, and that dining satisfaction rose when diners saw the top-five ranking but not when they saw only sample names.
Hongbin Cai, Yuyu Chen and Hanming Fang run a randomised field experiment in a restaurant, designed to tell observational learning apart from a simple saliency effect. Showing diners a list of the five most popular dishes raised demand for those dishes, whereas showing only the names of sample dishes had no significant effect. The abstract reports modest evidence that the effect was stronger among infrequent customers, and that dining satisfaction rose when diners saw the top-five ranking but not when they saw only sample names.
Written from the abstract as published with the paper, read 2026-10-28.
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Cai, H., Chen, Y., & Fang, H. (2009). Observational learning: Evidence from a randomized natural field experiment. American Economic Review, 99(3), 864-882. doi:10.1257/aer.99.3.864 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.3.864