Seminar 1: Josué Ortega and Moritz Mosenhauer

26th of February, 2016

Summary

The session’s topic was all about (in-)attention. Josué Ortega and Moritz Mosenhauer presented their thoughts on the matter.

Josué's Talk: Rational Inattention in Online Dating

“In this talk I will present rational inattention models. I will give a brief explanation of the subject and will show how the endogenous levels of attention can make a decision maker change his preferred alternatives. I will present a field experiment that tests the prediction of newly developed attention discrimination models (Bartos et a., American Economic Review, forthcoming). The main implication is that endogenous attention is a new channel through which discrimination arises in a major social phenomenon such as online dating, responsible of one third of modern marriages. Our experiment design allows us to test several claims made by online dating platforms that social scientists were skeptical about.”

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Moritz's Talk: Optimal Tunnelling

“In my talk, I will outline a model of tunneling. Choosing to not be informed about certain events may arise as an endogenous, optimal reaction to the preferences of a cognitively constraint agent. At the heart of the effect lies an interplay between two systems of attention allocation: a goal-driven/ top-down system and a stimulus-driven/ bottom-up system. I provide a framework for incorporating both aspects into a problem of information acquisition and present some first results on how forces affect the negotiation between the two.”

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