We investigate how information demand shapes belief formation using a randomized experiment on COVID-19 vaccines. We isolate the causal effect of information choice by orthogonalizing exposure from demand. We find that belief updating is substantially larger when subjects receive information they previously chose to read. Our empirical results suggest that individuals systematically select information they perceive as more relevant to their decision-making, and consequently, they update their beliefs more significantly when exposed to self-selected information.
We utilized the 2016 Taiwanese General Election to see how partisan news can change voters' behavior. We find that when the voters read the information in favor of their own political ideology, they were more likely to be influenced. We also find a strong "new party" effect that the information about the new parties largely persuaded the subjects to vote for the new parties. We suggest this is due to the exposure of unfamiliar information that conveyed closer political ideology to the subjects.
(Preliminary version available upon request)
We study whether casting a first vote makes voters less responsive to new political information and fix their beliefs. Leveraging the 2021 Taiwanese Referendum, we randomly exposed young individuals—some eligible to vote and others just underage—to partisan information about the referendum’s propositions. This design allows us to isolate the effect of voting experience from self-selection. We find that eligible voters respond more to information on pro-environmental propositions: they reduce support for reopening a nuclear power plant and increase support for protecting algal reefs after reading the corresponding information. These treatments also make eligible voters more likely to stick with their original pro-environmental votes, suggesting a confirming effect of having voted. The heterogeneity in treatment effects is strongest among those who care most about environmental issues, indicating that the first act of voting can serve as an ideological assertion. Our findings show how early political participation can entrench beliefs—especially among individuals with strong identities—and thus can contribute to polarization.
We examine whether people can correctly evaluate the value of information. In our experiment, we employ the canonical "balls and boxes" task, where subjects update their beliefs about the true state (box chosen) based on balls drawn from the box. Subjects receive different representations of the information, featuring varying degrees of simplification relative to the raw data. Before subjects undertake the tasks, we elicit their willingness to pay (WTP) for each representation. We first find that subjects' WTP does not strictly align with theoretical informativeness; specifically, subjects prefer to see a "proportion" (e.g., 20% orange balls), even though it is not the most informative representation. Furthermore, we find that subjects do not necessarily perform better with the representation they prefer, suggesting a lack of meta-cognitive awareness regarding how effectively they can utilize the information.
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(Stay tuned for updates)