In this paper I study a model of life-cycle consumption in which individuals react optimally to their own income process but ignore economy wide information. Since individual income is less persistent than aggregate income consumers will react too little to aggregate income variation. Aggregate consumption will be excessively smooth. Since aggregate information is slowly incorporated into consu...

As internet usage has grown recently, it has become important in our lives and has affected the way that we act and think. Particularly, people today consume and produce large amounts of media on the internet and in ways very different from before. A common complaint about this change, however, is that we experience information overload, with status updates constantly coming in from social netw...

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Social media platforms are having a profound impact on the so-called information ecosystem, specifically on how information is produced, distributed and consumed. Social media in particular has contributed to the rise of user generated content and consequently to a greater diversity in online content. On the other hand, social media networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, have become information...

This paper examines responses to a national FDA advisory that urged at-risk individuals to limit store-bought fish consumption due to the dangers of methyl-mercury. We investigate consumer response using both parametric and nonparametric methods. Some targeted consumers significantly reduced canned fish purchases as a result of the advisory, suggesting that information-based policies can achiev...

We develop a model of decision makers’ demand for agricultural economic information services. This model treats choice of external decision-support services as a function of actors’ assessment of how alternative investments in information complement their internal competencies. Data from a survey in four commodity systems are used to evaluate hypotheses as to how human capital, and functional r...