Belief Updating and Voters' Adaptive Search and Processing of New Information

• In Event: Innovations in Experimental Methods

Abstract

To understand voters' choices, we need to understand the type of information agents base their decisions on and how information is sought, gathered, and processed. Because agents are time-constrained, the sequential order with which they seek information is essential because agents update their beliefs during their search process in an adaptive way.
This study uses a laboratory experiment to disentangle the information the belief updating/processing stage from the information search stage by allowing subjects to select what piece of information they want to store after their information search. The study uses a within-subject design with three treatments: a "costless information retrieval treatment", in which agents can freely store and retrieve all pieces of information theyr wish to; a "no retrieval treatment," in which agents cannot retrieve information: and a "costly information treatment," in which agents can store pieces of information, but retrieval is costly. This last treatment represents a more realistic situation in which agents are bound in the amount of information they can physically store: the limitedness of holding space makes the information costly to store. Therefore, we expect agents to keep only information they plan to retrieve/consult. Results show that subjects seek less information and spend more time consulting each piece of new information as the retrieval cost increases. Consistent with our conjecture, agents search adaptively by updating their beliefs after each new piece of information is consulted.

Authors

• Anna Bassi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Tyler Steelman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill