Belief updating and the demand for information

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ambuehl, Sandro; Li, Shengwu
• 署名单位: University of Toronto; University Toronto Scarborough; University of Toronto; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2017.11.009
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 21-39
• 关键词: Demand for information; Belief updating; Responsiveness to information; probability weighting; Experimental economics

摘要

How do individuals value noisy information that guides economic decisions? In our laboratory experiment, we find that individuals underreact to increasing the informativeness of a signal, thus undervalue high-quality information, and that they disproportionately prefer information that may yield certainty. Both biases appear to be mainly due to non-standard belief updating. We find that individuals differ consistently in their responsiveness to information - the extent that their beliefs move upon observing signals. Individual parameters of responsiveness to information have explanatory power in two distinct choice environments and are unrelated to proxies for mathematical aptitude. Crown Copyright (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.