Theory Workshop - Vivek Roy-Chowdhury (Cambridge)

Title: Temptation to Consume Information (Job Market Talk)

It is well known that individuals avoid information in many important circumstances. By allowing individuals to restrict their ability to access information ahead of time, we reveal that around half are nonetheless tempted by information they want to avoid. Some individuals are eventually offered the information, regardless of preferences for commitment, and a small share make dynamically inconsistent choices. Self-control costs are typically unobserved, but we implement a novel empirical strategy by showing theoretically that response time increases in self-control costs for a resistible temptation. We find that preferences for commitment are strikingly consistent with sophistication about self-control costs, indicating that avoiding information becomes less attractive at the time of its availability. To provide intuition for our results, we show how temptation can arise in a dual-self model of information preferences with imperfect recall. We discuss implications for research on intrinsic preferences for information, strategic information avoidance, and markets for information.