We show how information acquisition costs can be identified using observable choice data. Identifying information costs from behavior is especially relevant when these costs depend on factors-such as time, effort, and cognitive resources-that are difficult to observe directly, as in models of rational inattention. Using willingness-to-pay data for opportunity sets-which require more or less information to make choices-we establish a set of canonical properties that are necessary and sufficient to identify information costs. We also provide an axiomatic characterization of the induced rationally inattentive preferences and show how they reveal the amount of information a decision-maker acquires.Keywords. Information costs, Blackwell order, information acquisition, menu choice, rational inattention. JEL classification. D81, D83. This paper merges our independent works, previously circulated as "Axiomatic Foundations for Rational Inattention" (de Oliveira), "Rational Inattention: A Decision-Theoretic Perspective" (Denti), and "Decision Making with Rational Inattention" (Mihm and Ozbek). We are grateful to Larry Blume, Simone CerreiaVioglio, Eddie Dekel, Fabio Maccheroni, Paola Manzini, Massimo Marinacci, Marco Mariotti, Tapan Mitra, Todd Sarver, and Joerg Stoye for invaluable guidance and support. We also thank Nabil Al-Najjar, Andrew Caplin, Aaron Bodoh-Creed, Giulia Brancaccio, Enrico Cantoni, Mark Dean, David Easley, Ludovica Gazzé, Peter Klibanoff, John Leahy, Samreen Malik, Jawwad Noor, Efe Ok, Pietro Ortoleva, Luciano Pomatto, Debraj Ray, Marciano Siniscalchi, Juuso Toikka, Mirko Wiederholt, Muhamet Yildiz, various seminar and conference participants, the editor and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.
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We relate two main representations of the cost of acquiring information: a cost that depends on the experiment performed, as in statistical decision theory, and a cost that depends on the distribution of posterior beliefs, as in applications of rational inattention. We show that in many cases of interest, posterior-based costs are inconsistent with a primitive model of costly experimentation. The inconsistency is at the core of known limits to the application of rational inattention in games and, more broadly, in equilibrium analyses where beliefs are endogenous; we show that an experiment-based approach helps to understand and overcome these difficulties. (JEL D82, D83)
In many strategic environments, information acquisition is a central component of the game that is played. Being uncertain about a payoff‐relevant state, a player in a game has a twofold incentive to acquire information: learning the state and learning what others know. We develop a model of information acquisition in games that accounts for players' incentive to learn what others know. In applications to rational inattention and global games, we prove the power of this incentive. When information acquisition is “independent,” that is, players can acquire information only about the state, severe coordination problems emerge among rationally inattentive players. When information acquisition is “unrestricted,” that is, players can acquire information about the state and each other's information in a flexible way, we show that rational inattention admits a sharp logit characterization and we provide a new rationale for selecting risk dominant equilibria in coordination games.
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