Social media rumors not only affect the health of online social networks, but also reduce the quality of information accessed by its users. In the case of emergencies, the rapid spread of rumors often triggers mass anxiety and panic. This study integrates the planned behavior (TPB) and...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of professionals’ inflation forecasts inattentiveness. We introduce and empirically investigate a new generalized model of inattentiveness due to informational rigidity. In doing so, we outline a novel model that considers the non-linear...

This paper studies static rational inattention problems with multiple actions and multiple shocks. We solve for the optimal signals chosen by agents and provide tools to interpret information processing. By relaxing restrictive assumptions previously used to gain tractability, we allow agents...

This paper shows that agent inattention to taxes generates a time-inconsistency problem in the choice of tax policy. In equilibrium, inattention leads to inefficiently high tax rates and a taxation bias emerges. Combining structural and sufficient statistics approaches, we quantify the magnitude...

We investigate whether the presence of a default interacts with the willingness of decision-makers to gather, process and consider information. In an online experiment, where about 2,300 participants choose between two compiled charity donation options worth $ 100, we vary the availability of...

In the service sector, such as tourism and hospitality, a traveler often tries to find information about their destination digitally, comparing it to alternatives available to have the best option. This demand businesses that are in the tourism and hospitality sector to advertise their...

With the dissemination of web technologies, the transparency of other people's opinions has increased tremendously, thus the possibilities of observing other consumers' decisions have also risen. Consumers may take a shortcut to follow a herd - according to which people discount their own...

A feature central to the success of e-commerce Web sites is the design of an effective interface to present product information. However, the suitability of the prevalent information formats in supporting various online shopping tasks is not known. Using the cognitive fit theory as the...

This paper studies the welfare effects of information in a sequential consumer search environment. Consumers search in the market and observe a noisy signal about the match value upon being matched with a firm, based on which they make their purchasing decisions. We construct the class of...

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain...

When there is strategic complementarity and all agents have access to public information, but only a subset of them has access to private information, strategic complementarity within the subset of privately-informed agents enhances the focal power of public information. This results to an...

I examine a cheap talk game with two decisions, two payoff-relevant states, and two senders. The model features interdependence because information about each state affects both decisions. Senders are imperfectly informed and communication depends on the nature of their information. I first...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy under rational inattention: the policy maker optimally chooses her information subject to a processing constraint. Our analytical results emphasize how the policy maker’s information choices shape her expectations and the dynamics of the macroeconomy....

It is well documented that policy and behavioral responses to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic have become politically polarized in the United States. We test whether some of these differences may be the result of varying exposure to information using a nationally representative sample of...

This paper is a contribution to the analysis of optimal monetary policy. It begins with a critical assessment of the existing literature, arguing that most work is based on implausible models of inflation-output dynamics. It then suggests that this problem may be solved with some recent...

Do firms release news strategically in response to investor inattention? We consider news about earnings and analyze the response of returns to announcements on Friday and other weekdays. Friday announcements have less immediate and more delayed stock return response. The delayed response as a...

We review the theory of information cascades and social learning. Our goal is to describe in a relatively integrated and accessible way the more important themes, insights and applications of the literature as it has developed over the last thirty years. We also highlight open questions and...

This study investigates how region-specific shocks affect international behavior of individuals when information is partially or scarcely spread across the border. We use both local and international tourist data pertaining to Hakone in Japan, to focus on two exogeneous region-specific shocks of...

We use a laboratory experiment to study how mutual payoff information affects play in strategic settings. Subjects play the Prisoner's Dilemma or Stag Hunt game against randomly re-matched opponents under two information treatments. In our partial-information treatment subjects are shown only...

This paper studies how partial information regarding the true number of infected affects optimal mitigation and testing policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We start by documenting two motivating observations which highlight the value of information: First, an overreaction in mitigation at the...

This paper studies the effects of information acquisition in mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Information acquisition, proxied by downloads of filings on the SEC EDGAR website, improves the market’s assessment of deal synergies and the valuation of non-deal peer firms. Specifically, the...

This paper studies the role of observational learning in search markets where buyers do not take the list price as a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Using a unique data from the Beijing housing market, we estimate a structural model in which buyers infer a seller’s reservation value from the...

Aggregate cost uncertainty, arising from real shocks or unanticipated inflation, reduces the informativeness of prices by scrambling relative and aggregate variations. But when agents can acquire additional information, such increased noise may in fact lead them to become better informed, and...

We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot process all available information, but they...

By introducing the implementation of the Key Audit Matters (KAM) Disclosure Standards for China’s companies cross-listed in Hong Kong in 2017, we present evidence that KAM disclosure reduces analysts’ company visits, which is an important channel of information acquisition. The decreasing...

We study the role of beliefs about experts' honesty in a market for credence goods with second opinions and overtreatment. Experts are honest or dishonest. The population shares a common belief about the share of honest experts, which may be incorrect. We characterize the belief that maximizes...

This paper studies the effects of the mandatory implementation of a more informative disclosure regime on firms’ financial constraints and investment policies. I run a difference-in-difference analysis and find that firms moving from a voluntary use of the regime to a mandatory use increase...

This paper develops a search model in which both the information obtained during the search process and the information possessed by consumers prior to search influence their choices. We estimate our model on a data set from an experiment that has two novel features: (i) it contains information...

Modern-day search platforms generally have two layers of information presentation. The outer layer displays the collection of search results with attributes selected by platforms, and consumers click on a product to reveal all its attributes in the inner layer. The information revealed in the...

This paper examines the causal relationship between global stock market performance and Google search volume index (SVI) surrounding the disastrous event of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Based on 6,106 stock index-day observations of 71 countries during the period from 1 January 2020 to...

Our decisions often depend on our subjective perceptions of the surrounding reality and we base our perceptions on the information we have available to us. Consider for instance our assessments of a variety of societal challenges we face, from immigration to inequality. Our perceptions of the...

We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot process all available information, but they...

Recent theoretical and empirical work characterizes attention as a limited resource that decision-makers strategically allocate. There has been less research on the dynamic interdependence of attention: how paying attention now may affect performance later. In this paper, we exploit...

A buyer can either buy a good at a local monopolist or search for it in the market at a market price. The more intensely the buyer searches, the more likely he will find the good in the market, whereas if his search fails, he can still buy it from the local monopolist. We show that a buyer with...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...

Job seekers often face substantial information frictions related to potential job quality. This is especially true in international labor markets, where intermediaries match prospective migrants with employers abroad. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about...

We survey retail investors at an online bank to study beliefs about the autocorrelation of aggregate stock returns, and how these beliefs shape investment decisions measured in administrative account data. Individuals' beliefs exhibit substantial heterogeneity and predict trading responses to...

Purpose - In a context where retail stores are closing down and high streets are declining, the purpose of this paper is to analyse on-site shopping by tourists. This work identifies the drivers that lead tourists to use digital information sources at the beginning of the shopping process....

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

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...