Rational Inattention when Decisions Take Time

The authors would like to thank Mark Dean, Sebastian Di Tella, Mira Frick, Xavier Gabaix, Matthew Gentzkow, Mike Harrison, Emir Kamenica, Divya Kirti, Jacob Leshno, Stephen Morris, Pietro Ortoleva, José Scheinkman, Ilya Segal, Ran Shorrer, Joel Sobel, Miguel Villas-Boas, Ming Yang, and participants at the Cowles Theory conference, 16th SAET Conference, Barcelona GSE Summer Conference on Stochastic Choice, Stanford GSB research lunch, 2018 ASSA meetings, UC Berkeley Theory Seminar, and UC San Diego Theory Seminar for helpful discussions on this topic, Tianhao Liu for excellent research assistance, and the NSF for research support. We would particularly like to thank Philipp Strack and Doron Ravid

for discussing an earlier version of the paper, and Simon Kelly for sharing data from Kelly et al. (2021). Portions of this paper circulated previously as the working papers “Rational Inattention with Sequential Information Sampling,” “Rational Inattention in Continuous Time,” and “Information Costs and Sequential Information Sampling,” and portions appeared in Benjamin Hébert's Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• technical appendix

• October 22, 2019