(Current Version: Dec. 24, 2023)
Rational information acquisition theory predicts that people select information that is more informative, thus people will be more persuaded by the information they select. We test the theory in a critical real-world context—information about COVID-19 vaccines. We conduct an online experiment in Taiwan where the subjects select information about COVID-19 vaccines, and then the subjects update their beliefs about the vaccine effectiveness and preferences of vaccines. As our design distinguishes different stages of the rational acquisition framework, it allows us to diagnose the underlying mechanism of the theory. Our empirical findings demonstrate evidence that people's information acquisition generally coheres with the rational theory framework predictions, that is, people choose information when the information is more likely to alter their decisions. We show that our subjects' beliefs change more when they see the information they select. We also find evidence of change in vaccine choices after they receive the information they select, which further suggests that the subjects follow the rational information acquisition framework.
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 conduct the canonical "balls-and-boxes" ("balls-in-urns") experiment, where we provided different types of reports about the signals. We found that people are further away from the Bayesian posterior when they receive the theoretically more informative report: the counts or the difference of the different colored balls, while receiving less the informative report of the ratio of different colored balls yields better guesses. We also elicit the subjects' willingness to pay for the reports prior to the updating tasks. We find the subjects are willing to pay more for the reports with which they perform better in the belief updating tasks.
(Preliminary version available upon request)
The first vote can be a crucial political assertion that causes people to stick to their beliefs even after reading the information. In this study, we examine the interaction of voting experience and the persuasiveness of information. To control the potential endogeneity arising from the self-selection to vote, we use eligibility as the random cutoff, as the ineligible voters can never select to vote. We utilized the 2021 Taiwanese Referendum to see whether new information heterogeneously impacts people's voting choices between eligible and ineligible voters. We find that the eligible subjects become less supportive when they see negative information about nuclear power plants and more supportive when they see positive information about algal reefs. The treatments make the eligible nay voters in nuclear power plants and yea voters in algal reefs stick on their votes more, suggesting the confirming effect of the action of voting. The heterogeneity between eligible and ineligible subjects is more profound among the subjects who care about environmental issues the most, which indicates that the first vote can be an active assertion to environmental voters.