Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens ā€¢ Print ISSN: 0012-9682 ā€¢ Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2021, Volume 89, Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA17173
p. 1717-1751

Olivier Gossner, Jakub Steiner, Colin Stewart

We study the impact of manipulating the attention of a decisionā€maker who learns sequentially about a number of items before making a choice. Under natural assumptions on the decisionā€maker's strategy, directing attention toward one item increases its likelihood of being chosen regardless of its value. This result applies when the decisionā€maker 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.


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