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on Cognitive and Behavioural Economics |
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Issue of 2026–07–27
two papers chosen by Marco Novarese, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale |
| By: | Krishna Dasaratha; Kevin He |
| Abstract: | In an incentivized laboratory experiment, we study how people account for and respond to others' incentives for paying attention. Participants learn a binary state from an attention task under high or low accuracy incentives. We ask subjects to predict their peers' accuracy based on the peers' incentives and to aggregate answers from multiple peers with different incentives. Most subjects fail to consistently understand that peers with stronger incentives are more accurate, and these subjects also perform worse in individual attention tasks. Subjects also participate in a social-learning task where they first learn the binary state from an attention task, then observe a peer's guess about the state in the same task, and finally make a guess themselves. We find behavior in these tasks is inconsistent with leading models of flexible costly information acquisition. In particular, subjects fail to pay more attention when paired with lower incentive peers. Overall, we find that many decision-makers do not respond to others' incentives for accuracy even when those incentives are transparent. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.31850 |
| By: | Luca Braghieri; Ro'ee Levy; Hannah Trachtman |
| Abstract: | We study the drivers of like-minded and low-reliability news-following on social media, and the effectiveness of interventions targeting them. In a five-week field experiment with more than 3, 000 U.S. Facebook users, we document the passive nature of participants' news portfolio formation process and the role of behavioral frictions. The experiment varies whether participants are prompted to re-optimize the portfolio of news pages they follow on Facebook through a user-friendly platform-integrated interface, and whether they receive personalized information about outlet slant and reliability. In contrast to canonical models of news consumption, we find that the re-optimization interface induces large portfolio changes even without new information, while information alone has no effect unless paired with re-optimization. Our interventions produce two main effects: they reduce the slant and increase the reliability of users' portfolios, thus potentially mitigating negative externalities for democracy, and they move users' portfolios closer to their stated preferences, mitigating internalities. |
| Keywords: | news consumption, social media, behavioral frictions, information experiment, slant, choice architecture |
| JEL: | D90 L82 P00 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12771 |