Dynamically Aggregating Diverse Information

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously — where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and also how to allocate attention across them — until an endogenously chosen time, at which point a decision is taken. The paper presented in this Virtual Market Design Seminar provides an exact characterization of the optimal information acquisition strategy under weak conditions on the agent’s prior belief about the different attributes. The authors then apply this characterization to derive new results regarding: (1) endogenous information acquisition for binary choice, (2) strategic information provision by biased news sources, and (3) the dynamic consequences of attention manipulation.