题目：Choosing Between Information Bundles

主讲人：关梦龙，宾夕法尼亚州立大学

时间：2025年3月21日（星期五）上午9:30-11:00

地点：线上Zoom会议，扫描文末二维码即可参会

主讲人简介:

Menglong Guan is an Assistant Professor at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UC Santa Barbara in 2024. His research is in Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Applied Microeconomic Theory, focusing on information economics, complexity, and bounded rationality.

Abstract:

This paper presents an experimental study on how people choose sets of information sources (referred to as information bundles). The findings reveal that subjects frequently fail to choose the more instrumentally valuable bundle in binary choices, largely due to the challenge of integrating the information sources within a bundle to identify their joint information content. The mistakes in choices cannot be attributed to an inability to use information bundles. Instead, these mistakes are strongly explained by subjects’ tendency to follow a simple but imperfect heuristic when valuing them, which I call “common source cancellation (CSC).” The heuristic causes subjects to mistakenly disregard the common information source in two bundles and focus solely on the comparison of the sources that the two bundles do not share. As a result, choices between information bundles are made without adequately considering the joint information content of each bundle. Notably, CSC emerges as a robust explanation for the information bundle choices for all subjects, including those who make perfect use of information bundles to make inferences.