The OMDS/VGSE Vienna Joint Economics seminar is held weekly on Thursdays during the term.
VJE-Seminars scheduled in May:
- Speaker: Marta Serra-Garcia (UCSD)
- Title: The Attention-Information Tradeoff
- Time: Thursday, May 22, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12 (2-floor), OMP-1
- Abstract: How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? This paper combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals’ incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experiments that exogenously expose receivers to the content created. Attention incentives lead to significantly less information being transmitted, but not more factually inaccurate content. These incentives increase information demand and the knowledge of interested receivers. However, among the majority of receivers who do not demand more information, attention incentives lower knowledge and increase biases in beliefs, revealing that missing information can be a channel through which misperceptions arise.
- Speaker: Melis Kartal (WU Wien)
- Title: Sorting Fact from Fiction in a Complex World Under the Shadow of Motivated Reasoning
- Time: Thursday, May 8, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12 (2-floor), OMP-1
- Abstract: We combine a simple model and a survey-experimental study in Austria, Germany, and the UK to investigate how sorting fact from fiction and updating from news are influenced by cognitive ability, motivated reasoning, and overconfidence in complex topics, such as climate change and public health. We predict and find evidence that cognitive ability (i.e., both IQ and education) improves news discernment. The positive effect of cognitive ability on news discernment is robust and immune to motivated reasoning. In particular, the ability to give correct answers that counter one's existing issue biases increases in IQ and education. These novel results are good news, suggesting the malleability of news discernment. However, when we disaggregate data by news topic, we find that higher cognitive ability may sometimes boost motivated decision making. Our findings suggest that institutions matter. For example, higher trust in institutions reduces the magnitude of motivated reasoning, which likely helps limit opinion polarization in the longer term.
- Speaker: Andrea Pozzi (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance-EIEF)
- Title: Customers as Buffer
- Time: Thursday, May 15, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12 (2-floor), OMP-1
- Abstract: Exploiting novel data on wealth management of retail customers by Italian banks, we document that, bonds issued by the bank, where the household have their main bank account, account for a very large share of invested wealth. We argue that this does not originate from consumers preferences but, rather, from banks prowess in influencing financial decisions of their customers. We quantify the ability of influencing customers along different dimensions and highlight several potential implications of heterogeneity in this skill for firm, as well as market outcomes.
