Behavioral Inattention

Inattention is a central, unifying theme for much of behavioral economics. It permeates such disparate fields as microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance, public economics, and industrial organization. It enables us to think in a rather consistent way about behavioral biases, speculate about their origins, and trace out their implications for market outcomes. This survey first discusses the most basic models of attention, using a fairly unified framework. Then, it discusses the methods used to measure attention, which present a number of challenges on which much progress has been done. It then examines the various theories of attention, both behavioral and more Bayesian. It finally discusses some applications. For instance, inattention offers a way to write a behavioral version of basic microeconomics, as in consumer theory, producer theory, and Arrow-Debreu. A last section is devoted to open questions in the attention literature. This chapter is a pedagogical guide to the literature on attention. Derivations are self-contained. ∗[email protected]. Draft chapter for the Handbook of Behavioral Economics, edited by Douglas Bernheim, Stefano DellaVigna and David Laibson. Comments solicited. Please email me if you see an important reference that’s missing (including your own papers). I thank Vu Chau and Antonio Coppola for excellent research assistance. For comments and suggestions, I thank the editors of this Handbook, Hunt Allcott, and Gautam Rao. For sharing their with data, I thank Stefano DellaVigna, Josh Pollet, and Devin Pope. I thank the Sloan Foundation for support.