Attention Please!
Olivier Gossner, Jakub Steiner, Colin Stewart
Econometrica · 2021 · Volume 89 · Issue 4
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 decision-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.
Keywords
Sequential sampling, marketing, persuasion, attention
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