We report on the results of an experiment designed to disentangle behavioral biases in information aggregation of committees. Subjects get private signals about the state of world, send binary messages, and finally vote under either majority or unanimity rules. Committee decisions are...

Many committees - juries, political task forces, etc. - spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

We conduct a field experiment with job seekers to investigate how feedback influences job search and labor market outcomes. Job seekers who receive feedback on their ability compared to other job seekers update their beliefs and increase their search effort. Specifically, initially...

How do voters allocate costly attention to alternative political issues? And how does selective ignorance of voters interact with policy design by politicians? We address these questions by developing a model of electoral competition with rationally inattentive voters. Rational inattention...

Beliefs are a central determinant of behavior. Recent models assume that beliefs about or the anticipation of future consumption have direct utilityconsequences. This gives rise to informational preferences, i.e., preferences over the timing and structure of information. Using a novel and...

We investigate the elasticity of moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose that individuals suffer from higher moral costs when rejecting a certain donation, and thus pay for moral ignorance. Consistent with our model, we find significant...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...

Capitalism is characterized by booms and busts. Periods of strong growth in output alternate with periods of declines in economic growth. Every macro-economic theory should attempt to explain these endemic business cycle movements. In this paper I present two paradigms that attempt to explain...

Evidence from hypothetical scenarios strongly suggests the existence of a sunk cost bias, the tendency to ‘throw good money after bad money.’ However, the few studies using incentives are inconclusive. In addition, evidence on potential psychological channels underlying such a bias is...