Designing Information Provision Experiments

Haaland, Ingar; Roth, Christopher; Wohlfart, Johannes

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3638879

Cited by 88 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…We further show that beliefs about the impact that new technologies have on the electoral process are crucial to our understanding of public attitudes towards them. This finding contributes to a wider body of literature that investigates how potentially erroneous beliefs that people hold drive their behavior [89][90][91][92][93][94][95].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 63%

Partisan self-interest is an important driver for people’s support for the regulation of targeted political advertising

2021

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The rapid emergence of online targeted political advertising has raised concerns over data privacy and what the government’s response should be. This paper tested and confirmed the hypothesis that public attitudes toward stricter regulation of online targeted political advertising are partially motivated by partisan self-interest. We conducted an experiment using an online survey of 1549 Americans who identify as either Democrats or Republicans. Our findings show that Democrats and Republicans believe that online targeted political advertising benefits the opposing party. This belief is based on their conviction that their political opponents are more likely to be mobilized by online targeted political advertising than are supporters of their own party. We exogenously manipulated partisan self-interest considerations of a random subset of participants by truthfully informing them that, in the past, online targeted political advertising has benefited Republicans. Our findings show that Republicans informed about this had less favorable attitudes toward regulation than did their uninformed co-partisans. This suggests that Republicans’ attitudes regarding stricter regulation are based not solely on concerns about privacy violations, but also, in part, are caused by beliefs about partisan advantage. The results imply that people are willing to accept violations of their privacy if their preferred party benefits from the use of online targeted political advertising.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 63%

Partisan self-interest is an important driver for people’s support for the regulation of targeted political advertising

2021

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“…First, in many controlled (experimental) settings, only a short time tends to elapse between the elicitation of prior beliefs, provision of new information, and elicitation of posterior beliefs. Outside the laboratory, Haaland et al (2020) note that eliciting updated beliefs through follow-up surveys is relatively recent, pioneered by studies such as those of Kuziemko et al (2015) and Cavallo et al (2017). But even in these cases, most follow-up surveys usually take place 1-8 weeks after the initial information provision.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But even in these cases, most follow-up surveys usually take place 1-8 weeks after the initial information provision. 2 With a short time elapsing between elicitation of prior beliefs, new information provision, and follow-up survey, it is reasonable to assume that ν can be treated as white noise, allowing the researcher to directly focus on changes in beliefs purely as a function of the experimentally manipulated news (e.g., Haaland et al 2020;Wiswall and Zafar 2015). In our setting (see below) this assumption is problematic-a priori there is little reason to expect ν will be centred on zero; it is also reasonable to assume individuals obtain additional information concerning wages between rounds, such as through job search, some of which will be private (e.g.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Updating great expectations: The effect of peer salary information on own-earnings forecasts

Jones¹,

Santos²

2020

WIDER Working Paper

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How jobseekers set their earnings expectations is central to job search models. To study this process, we track the evolution of own-earnings forecasts over 18 months for a representative panel of university-leavers in Mozambique and estimate the impact of a wage information intervention. We sent participants differentiated messages about the average earnings of their peers, obtained from prior survey rounds. Demonstrating the stickiness of (initially optimistic) beliefs, we find an elasticity of own-wage expectations to this news of around 7 per cent in the short term and 16 per cent over the long term, which compares to a 22 per cent elasticity in response to unanticipated actual wage offers. We further find evidence of heterogeneous updating heuristics, where factors such as the initial level of optimism, cognitive skills, perceived reliability of the information, and valence of the news shape how wage expectations are updated. We recommend institutionalizing public information about earnings.

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“…Finally, our study is related to a growing literature on information experiments (recently summarized by Haaland et al, 2020). However, few studies have attempted to endogenize the process of information selection (see Fuster et al, 2020, for a related discussion), which is a key feature of our experimental design.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biases in Information Selection and Processing: Survey Evidence from the Pandemic

et al. 2021

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How people form beliefs is crucial for understanding decision-making under uncertainty. This is particularly true in a situation such as a pandemic, where beliefs will affect behaviors that impact public health as well as the aggregate economy. We conduct two survey experiments to shed light on potential biases in belief formation, focusing in particular on the tone of information people choose to consume and how they incorporate this information into their beliefs. In the first experiment, people express their preferences over pandemic-related articles with optimistic and pessimistic headlines, and are then randomly shown one of the articles. We find that respondents with more pessimistic prior beliefs about the pandemic are substantially more likely to prefer pessimistic articles, which we interpret as evidence of confirmation bias. In line with this, respondents assigned to the less preferred article rate it as less reliable and informative (relative to those who prefer it); they also discount information from the article when it is less preferred. We further find that these motivated beliefs end up impacting incentivized behavior. In a second experiment, we study how partisan views interact with information selection and processing. We find strong evidence of source dependence: revealing the news source further distorts information acquisition and processing, eliminating the role of prior beliefs in article choice.

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Designing Information Provision Experiments

Abstract: Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

Cited by 88 publications

References 41 publications

Partisan self-interest is an important driver for people’s support for the regulation of targeted political advertising

Partisan self-interest is an important driver for people’s support for the regulation of targeted political advertising

Updating great expectations: The effect of peer salary information on own-earnings forecasts

Biases in Information Selection and Processing: Survey Evidence from the Pandemic

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