This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to...

We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with rational inattention by households and firms. Consumption responds slowly to interest rate changes because households decide to pay little attention to the real interest rate. Prices respond quickly to some shocks and slowly to other...

The world recently experienced several rare events with disastrous consequences: the global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the Fukushima nuclear accident. These events have in common that key decision-makers were unprepared for them, which aggravated these events. We...

Dynamic rational inattention problems used to be difficult to solve. This paper provides simple, analytical results for dynamic rational inattention problems. We start from the benchmark rational inattention problem. An agent tracks a variable of interest that follows a Gaussian process. 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...

We solve a real business cycle model with rational inattention (an RI-RBC model). In the RI-RBC model, the growth rates of employment, investment, and output are about as persistent as in the data, with an amount of inattention consistent with survey data on expectations. Moreover, consumption,...

Dynamic rational inattention problems used to be difficult to solve. This paper provides simple, analytical results for dynamic rational inattention problems. We start from the benchmark rational inattention problem. An agent tracks a variable of interest that follows a Gaussian process. The...

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to...

The world recently experienced several rare events with disastrous consequences: the global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the Fukushima nuclear accident. These events have in common that key decision-makers were unprepared for them, which aggravated these events. We...

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...