Information Avoidance

* All three authors: Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University. We thank Joël van der Weele and three anonymous reviewers for comments. † Go to https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20151245 to visit the article page and view author disclosure statement(s). one can, according to standard economic assumptions, ignore it at no cost. Consistent with standard theory, there are countless situations in which information is useful and sought after. There are, in fact, situations in which people seek out, and are even willing to pay for, apparently useless information (see Eliaz and Schotter 2007, 2010; Loewenstein 1994; Powdthavee and Riyanto 2015). Our focus in this review is, however, on the opposite phenomenon—on the many situations in which people avoid information, even when it is free and could improve decision making.1 As we will discuss, information avoidance occurs not only when there is a strategic rationale for it, but also when beliefs directly enter the utility function. Casual observation, as well as considerable laboratory and field research that we review, suggests that information avoidance