The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field

James Archsmith, Anthony Heyes, Matthew Neidell and Bhaven Sampat

The Economic Journal, 2025, vol. 135, issue 671, 2192-2219

Abstract: Recent theoretical and empirical work characterises attention as a costly resource that decision-makers allocate strategically. There has been less research on the dynamic interdependence of attention: how paying attention now may affect performance later. In this paper, we exploit high-frequency data on decision-making by Major League Baseball umpires to examine this. We find that umpires apply greater effort to higher-stakes decisions, but also that effort applied to earlier decisions increases errors later. These findings are consistent with the umpire being endowed with a depletable ‘budget’ of attention or the psychological theory of ego depletion. There is no such interdependence across the breaks that occur during the game (at the end of each half-inning) suggesting that even short rest periods can replenish attention budgets. An expectation of higher-stakes decisions in the future induces reduced attention to current decisions, consistent with a forward-looking agent allocating his budget strategically across a sequence of decisions of varying importance. We believe this to be the first large-scale empirical demonstration, from economics or psychology, that individuals may manage the stock of attention in anticipation of future use.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaf030 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:econjl:v:135:y:2025:i:671:p:2192-2219.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().