ICES Experimental Economics Brown Bag Lecture
Inattentive Voters: Experimental Evidence
Thursday, November 13, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), Room 5075
The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) presents an ICES Brown Bag Lecture featuring:
George Mason University
Inattentive Voters: Experimental Evidence
Abstract
We study costly information acquisition in collective decisions with common interests (a Condorcet jury setting). Theory predicts that as a jury's size increases, individuals’ incentives to gather information decline because their influence on the group decision diminishes. Previous experiments (Groβer & Seebauer 2016; Bhattacharya et al. 2017; Elbittar et al. 2020) find that information acquisition does not respond to changes in jury size or information cost. Are subjects acquiring more information than predicted because they are concerned for the group, or are these simply decision-making errors? To investigate this, we depart from previous studies that relied on signal acquisition with monetary costs; our subjects tradeoff between gathering information for themselves and for the group (signal acquisition with opportunity costs). We find that, consistent with theoretical predictions, subjects with more control over the group decision acquire more information for the group. Our results refine our understanding of how decision control affects voters' attention, advancing the understanding of costly information gathering in Condorcet settings.
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