We examine whether the desire for more information is people's dominant motive for reading economic and political news. Drawing on representative samples of the U.S. population with more than 15,000 respondents in total, we measure and experimentally vary people's beliefs about the...

Environmental managers face substantial uncertainty when deciding on management actions. To reduce this uncertainty prior to decision-making, collecting new data may help arrive at more informed decisions. Whether any resulting improvement in the decision will outweigh the cost of collecting the...

In the seminal rational inattention model of Matĕjka and McKay (2015), logit demand arises from the discrete choice of agents who are uncertain about choice payoffs and who have access to a flexible, costly information acquisition technology (RI-logit). A notable limitation of this powerful...

Empirical evidence shows that the perception of information is strongly concentrated in those environments in which a mass of producers and users of knowledge interact through a distribution medium. This paper considers the consequences of this fact for economic equilibrium analysis. In...

Economists usually think that rational voters have little incentives to acquire costly information. We present a theoretical model to show that, in contrast to this widely held belief, rational voters acquire considerable amounts of information if media technology is available because then they...

Macroeconomic and sector-specific shocks exert differential effects on investment in disaggregate sectoral data. The response to macroeconomic shocks is hump-shaped, just as in aggregate data. The effects of sectoral innovations decrease monotonically. A calibrated model of investment with...