Investors have strong economic incentives to engage in unbiased information search in order to maximize the expected value of their investments. I examine whether an investor's psychological preference for information that supports his past investment decisions dominates his economic incentive...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of buyers and a finite number n of sellers. All buyers are uninformed, while at least one seller is privately informed about the true state of the...

Short-lived agents want to predict a random variable theta and have to decide how much effort to devote to collect private information and consequently how much to rely on public information. The latter is just a noisy average of past predictions. It is shown that costly information acquisition...

Questions about search engine bias have percolated in the academic literature for over a decade. In the past few years, the issue has evolved from a quiet academic debate to a full-blown regulatory and litigation frenzy. At the center of this maelstrom is Google, the dominant market player. This...

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or "strategic ignorance", is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. I show how existing experimental results on strategic ignorance can be rationalized as an equilibrium...

This paper studies the effects of information exchange and social networks on the performance of prediction markets with endogenous information acquisition. We provide a game-theoretic framework to resolve the question: Can social networks and information exchange promote the forecast efficiency...

In two empirical surveys in Germany the link between the information respondents have about climate change and their risk perception of the phenomenon was analysed. We found that a better understanding of the effects of climate change might lead to a decrease of the perceived hazard. In...

This paper puts forth a simple model explaining the manner in which news aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo! News build herd behavior through information cascades. The model suggests that (1) an increase in the number of Internet users will make herding more significant over the Internet,...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

We present a novel approach to finite Rational Inattention (RI) models based on the ignorance equivalent, a fictitious action with state-dependent payoffs that effectively summarizes the optimal learning and conditional choices. The ignorance equivalent allows us to recast the RI problem as a...