We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children's intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children's present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...

This paper studies sequential information acquisition by an ambiguity-averse decision maker (DM), who decides how long to collect information before taking an irreversible action. The agent optimizes against the worst-case belief and updates prior by prior. We show that the consideration of...

We review recent advances in the literature on news consumption. We first provide an overview of different empirical techniques to measure news consumption, including browser data, TV viewership data, and survey-based measures. We also discuss the pros and cons of these different techniques. We...

We provide evidence on the dynamics, drivers, and consequences of attention to the macroeconomy using tailored panel surveys of German firms and households. Draw-ing on novel measures of attention based on open-ended questions collected before and during a historic shock to inflation, we...

Agents undertaking economic decisions are exposed to an ever-increasing amount of information sources. This paper investigates how the number of available information sources impacts agents' ability to (i) select reliable sources and (ii) use their content effectively to update their beliefs. To...

We study how contingent thinking - that is, reasoning through all possible contingencies without knowing which is realized - affects belief updating. According to the Bayesian benchmark, beliefs updated after exposure to new information should be equivalent to beliefs assessed for the...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. For example, being inactive on social media can lead to social exclusion or not owning luxury brands can be associated with having a low social status. We show that, in the presence of such spillovers to...

Information provision experiments have become pivotal in understanding how beliefs influence human behavior in various social science contexts. These experiments, which manipulate the information sets available to respondents, enable the exogenous alteration of beliefs and perceived constraints,...

This paper investigates and quantifies citizens' susceptibility to fake news and assesses, using a randomized control trial, the effectiveness of a policy intervention to raise awareness. We find that the average citizen lacks proficiency in identifying fake news and harbors an inflated...