Individual and Collective Information Acquisition: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Many committees-juries, political task forces, etc.-spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such informationcollection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules affect outcomes. We also contrast static information collection, as in classical hypothesis testing, with dynamic collection, as in sequential hypothesis testing. Several insights emerge. Static information collection is excessive, and sequential information collection is nonstationary, producing declining decision accuracies over time. Furthermore, groups using majority rule yield especially hasty and inaccurate decisions. Nonetheless, sequential information collection is welfare enhancing relative to static collection, particularly when unanimous rules are used.

Is Attention Produced Optimally? Theory and Evidence from Experiments with Bandwidth Enhancements

“…Finally, our results that people do not select their attention environments optimally are consistent with the hypothesis that people might misoptimize their attention strategies in other ways. For example, people might misoptimize their choice of decision boundaries in sequential information acquisition problems (Reshidi et al, 2022) or might not choose their percent fastest average task times by the length and discernibility arms separately. The results are quantitatively and qualitatively similar.…”