Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of actors requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted attention-grabbing potentially harmful content. We argue digital literacy must include the competence critical ignoring—choosing what ignore where invest one’s l...

Selective attention is critical for controlling the input to mental processes. Attentional mechanisms act not only to select relevant stimuli but also to exclude irrelevant stimuli. There is evidence that we can actively ignore irrelevant information. We measured neural activity relating to successfully ignoring distracters (using preview search) and found increases in both the precuneus and pr...

It is well known that consumers have difficulty in dealing with low-probability, high-loss events. Frequently they fail to obtain insurance against such losses, even when the terms are very favorable. (Kunreuther 1997; Phelps, 1997, pp. 409-410, referring to “upside down” private insurance coverage to supplement Medicare). One obvious characterization of such behavior is that it represents non-...

Health insurers face financial risks when they assume liability for the difference between difference between premium revenues and their estimates of future claims costs for a group. Market reform proposals vastly increase the amount of risk health plans of all types will face. A case study is used to show how insurers bidding in an alliance environment must either commit contingency reserves t...

In a canonical decision problem with standard assumptions, we demonstrate that payoffs and probabilities may interact in such a way that expected-payoffmaximizing decisions do not depend on payoff-relevant information. This result holds without decision costs, cognitive constraints, or other forms of bounded rationality. Instances in which information-frugal decision rules achieve high levels o...

A model of information structure and common knowledge is presented which does not take states of the world as primitive. Rather, these states are constructed as sets of propositions, including propositions which describe knowledge. In this model information structure and measurability structure are endogenously defined in terms of the relation between the propositions. In particular, when agent...