Working Papers
Regret and Information Avoidance (Job Market Paper)
[PDF] [SSRN] [Supplementary Appendix] (Last updated: Oct 2024)
Abstract: Empirical evidence suggests that individuals selectively avoid information depending on past choices. We address these findings by studying an agent whose choice behavior can be modeled as if she trades off two conflicting effects of information. The first is a psychological cost from the regret about past choices that are revealed to be suboptimal by the information, whereas the second is the instrumental value of information for making better-informed choices in the future. Our main axioms reflect the agent's desire to have fewer options before the arrival of information and to have more options after the arrival of information. We also posit axioms that connect the agent's consumption choice with her information choice. We show that all parameters can be uniquely identified from the choice behavior. We also provide comparative statics on the agent's information aversion attitude.
Informativeness Orders over Ambiguous Experiments, conditionally accepted at Journal of Economic Theory
[PDF] [SSRN] (Last updated: December 2023)
Abstract: We generalize Blackwell’s informativeness order to ambiguous experiments. A decision maker might view a statistical experiment as ambiguous if she faces un- certainty about the data generating process for its signals. Formally, an ambiguous experiment is modeled as a mapping from an auxiliary state space to the set of unambiguous experiments. Each auxiliary state corresponds to a possible data gen- erating process. We show that one ambiguous experiment is preferred to another by every decision maker in every decision problem if and only if they are related by a condition called prior-by-prior dominance, which states that for any first-order belief the decision maker entertains on the auxiliary state space, the expected experiment resulting from this belief for the first experiment is Blackwell more informative than that of the second. This equivalence is robust for any class of monotone ambiguity preferences that nests expected utility. We obtain another informativeness order when we restrict attention to decision makers who apply the maxmin criterion to evaluate ambiguous experiments and connect this informativeness order to comparisons of sets of Blackwell experiments.
Work in Progress
Comparisons of Menus of Blackwell Experiments
Persuasion with A Constrained Signal Space