Economists have studied for a long time how decision-makers allocate scarce resources. The recent literature on rational inattention studies how decision-makers allocate the scarce resource attention. The idea is that decision-makers have a limited amount of attention and have to decide how to...

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms optimally 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...