Information Costs and Sequential Information Sampling

Benjamin Hébert and Michael Woodford

No 25316, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We propose a new approach to modeling the cost of information structures in rational inattention problems, the "neighborhood-based" cost functions. These cost functions have two properties that we view as desirable: they summarize the results of a sequential evidence accumulation problem, and they capture notions of "perceptual distance." The first of these properties is connected to an extensive literature in psychology and neuroscience, and the second ensures that neighborhood-based cost functions, unlike mutual information, make accurate predictions about behavior in perceptual experiments. We compare the implications of our neighborhood-based cost functions with those of a mutual-information cost function in a series of applications: security design, global games, modeling perceptual judgments, and a linear-quadratic-Gaussian tracking problem.

JEL-codes: D83 E70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ore and nep-upt
Note: ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Information Costs and Sequential Information Sampling (2018)
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