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AbstractPublic institutions seeking to facilitate effective decision making by boundedly rational constituents often must determine what information to provide and in what form to provide it. Ideally, this determination would reflect an understanding of how different kinds, forms, and sources of information are processed by constituents and influence constituents' beliefs. However, research on this topic—especially in the context of educational institutions, and with a focus on official numerical information versus electronic word of mouth—has been minimal. Considering the case of state governments wishing to inform citizens about their schools, we examine how parents and the US public evaluate schools after receiving two increasingly abundant kinds of school quality information: numerical government ratings and online parent comments. Using an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample, we find that perceptions of school quality are heavily influenced by parent comments even when these comments appear alongside official ratings. By contrast, the effects of official numerical ratings appear modest. Additional findings suggest that the comments' influence results from preferences for the information's source (parents over government) and style (narrative over numerical), and that nonprofit organizations are more trusted messengers of performance information than state governments. These results advance our theoretical understanding of the effects of different kinds of information on belief, and we conclude the article by discussing their implications for how public institutions disseminate information to their constituents.

We conduct an experiment to examine how providing decision makers with high vs. low peer performance information influences choices between exploration and exploitation. Previous work on organization-level learning suggests a high-performing peer would fuel exploration, while a low-performing peer would dampen it. In line with this, we find that individuals who receive information about a high-performing peer explore more than those who receive information about a low-performing peer. However, we also find that, compared to individuals with a low tendency to self-enhance, individuals with a high tendency to self-enhance are less likely to explore when receiving information about a high-performing peer. In fact, these individuals explore at levels comparable to those who receive information about a low-performing peer. We explain this behavioral pattern by demonstrating that, as individuals learn and improves, information about a high-performing peer increasingly results in mixed performance feedback; under these conditions of relative interpretive flexibility, exploration is moderated by decision makers' tendency to self-enhance. When these individual dynamics are aggregated, our data suggest that an organization that provides peer performance information may experience either the same or less exploration than an organization that does not, with the exact difference depending on its proportion of high self-enhancers. These insights into the contingencies and aggregate effects of how individuals interpret and respond to peer performance information are particularly relevant given recent interest in designing organizations that shape employee behavior through the provision of feedback, rather than through traditional instruments of coordination and control such as incentives or hierarchy.