Behavioral Inattention

Abstract

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor

“…Because attention is a critical cognitive resource, it is likely to be direct contributor to productivity. Some scholars argue that limited attention may underlie a number of behavioral biases and anomalies (Gabaix, 2019). We test whether increased sleep improves a measure of attention used in the sleep literature, and whether it improves participants' ability to attend to important aspects of their work environment, serving as a potential channel through which productivity effects may operate.…”

Psychology-Based Models of Asset Prices and Trading Volume

“…Bordalo et al (2017) and Bordalo et al (2018a) link the representativeness heuristic to extrapolative beliefs using a related, but distinct, argument. They build on a model of representativeness laid out in Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010) and Bordalo et al (2014) in which a type t is representative of a group G if the ratio…”

Visual Biases in Decision Making

“…We can use many methods to infer how decision makers allocate their attention. Some methods are indirect and infer attention through behaviors, while others are more direct such as measures of eye movements or neurological processes (Gabaix 2017). In this article, we focus on direct measures of visual attention by means of eye tracking and will refer to this simply as attention.…”