Attention please!

Olivier Gossner, Jakub Steiner and Colin Stewart

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study the impact of manipulating the attention of a decision-maker who learns sequentially about a number of items before making a choice. Under natural assumptions on the decision-maker’s strategy, directing attention toward one item increases its likelihood of being chosen regardless of its value. This result applies when the decisionmaker can reject all items in favor of an outside option with known value; if no outside option is available, the direction of the effect of manipulation depends on the value of the item. A similar result applies to manipulation of choices in bandit problems.

Keywords: sequential sampling; marketing; persuasion; attention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2021-07-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-mkt and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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Published in Econometrica, 26, July, 2021, 89(4), pp. 1717 - 1751. ISSN: 0012-9682

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107907/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Attention Please! (2021)
Working Paper: Attention Please! (2018)
Working Paper: Attention please! (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:107907

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