Does free information provision crowd out costly information acquisition? It's a matter of timing

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Aycinena, Diego; Elbittar, Alexander; Gomberg, Andrei; Rentschler, Lucas
• 署名单位: Universidad del Rosario; Chapman University System; Chapman University; Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas A.C. (CIDE); Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico; Utah System of Higher Education; Utah State University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.05.006
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 182-195
• 关键词: information acquisition; Rational ignorance; experiments

摘要

Conventional wisdom suggests that promising free information to an agent would crowd out costly information acquisition. We theoretically demonstrate that this intuition only holds as a knife-edge case in which priors are symmetric. Indeed, when priors are asymmetric, a promise of free information in the future induces agents to increase information acquisition. In the lab, we test whether such crowding out occurs for both symmetric and asymmetric priors. Our results are qualitatively in line with the predictions: When priors are asymmetric, the promise of future free information induces subjects to acquire more costly information.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.