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Theoretisch

Economic agents generally operate in uncertain environments and, prior to making decisions, invest time and resources to collect useful information. Consumers compare the prices charged by di.erent firms before purchasing a product. Politicians gather information from di.erent sources before implementing a policy. Doctors conduct several tests on patients before subscribing a treatment. Since having access to valuable information requires time, e.ort, and often money, a problem typically addressed by economists is how much information a decision-maker should collect before being su.- ciently convinced about one state of the world. Implicit in economic models that aim to identify the optimal amount of information to be gathered is the idea that, once information is available, there are no costs involved in interpreting and transmitting it. However there are plausible reasons to believe that the activity of information processing is far from being perfect. Looking at the quantitative dimension of information, a larger amount of information usually implies that more resources are needed in order to interpret it. In this respect, with the rise of the Internet, the cost of generating and transmitting information has fallen so dramatically that the scarce resource is not anymore information itself, but the attention needed to understand it. For example, the cost of sending an electronic manuscript to a journal is much lower than the opportunity cost of the time it takes to a referee to read and understand the paper. Modelling explicitly such opportunity costs may shed light on phenomena such as market congestion and information overload. ; Sinds het baanbrekende werk van Akerlof (1970) is de term 'informatie' uitgegroeid tot een essentieel begrip in het economische vocabulaire en is er een hele reeks vervolgonderzoek naar het onderwerp gedaan. Het voornaamste argument dat men tegenwoordig in de literatuur betre.ende Akerlof's paper tegenkomt is, dat economische ine.ciëntie (b.v. adverse selection en moral hazard) te wijten zijn aan het gebrek aan informatie. Echter heeft men recentelijk vastgesteld, dat de kwantiteit en kwaliteit van de informatie, die een individu ter beschikking heeft, niet de enige indicatoren zijn om de kwaliteit van een economisch product vast te kunnen stellen. Om een besluit te kunnen nemen, vertolkt ieder individu de verzamelde informatie, waarom gesteld kan worden, dat het proces van informatieverwerking zelf een sleutel element voor het nemen van beslissingen is.

PurposeThe authors draw on arousal-based models to develop and test a model of open-office noise and information processing. Specifically, the authors examined whether open-office noise changes how people process information and whether such a change has consequences for task performance.Design/methodology/approachIn a laboratory experiment, the authors randomly assigned participants (107 students at a business school) to either a silent condition or a condition that exposed them to open-office noise (irrelevant speech) while completing a task that requires cognitive flexibility. The authors measured participants' physiological arousal and the extent to which they processed information intuitively and analytically during the task.FindingsOpen-office noise increased urgent processing and decreased analytical processing, which led to a respective decrease and increase in task performance. In line with a neuroscientific account of cognitive processing, an increase in arousal (subjective and physiological) drove the detrimental effect of open-office noise on task performance.Practical implicationsUnderstanding the information-processing consequences of open-office noise can help managers make more informed decisions about workplace environments that facilitate performance.Originality/valueThe study is one of the first to examine the indirect effects of open-office noise on task performance through intuitive and analytical processing, while simultaneously testing and providing support for the accompanying physiological mechanism.

This article describes evidence suggesting that science curiosity counteracts politically biased information processing. This finding is in tension with two bodies of research. The first casts doubt on the existence of "curiosity" as a measurable disposition. The other suggests that individual differences in cognition related to science comprehension—of which science curiosity, if it exists, would presumably be one—do not mitigate politically biased information processing but instead aggravate it. The article describes the scale‐development strategy employed to overcome the problems associated with measuring science curiosity. It also reports data, observational and experimental, showing that science curiosity promotes open‐minded engagement with information that is contrary to individuals' political predispositions. We conclude by identifying a series of concrete research questions posed by these results.

AbstractWe examined whether second‐ and fifth‐graders could display differentiated social information processing (SIP) about known peers varying in affective ties. Children's response evaluation and decision (RED) and goal importance ratings were obtained for nine ambiguous provocations involving their best friends, neutral peers, and enemies (three stories for each relationship). For each story, RED was assessed for hostile, competent and passive responses to provocation, and the importance of four social goals was rated. Both second‐ and fifth‐graders displayed RED that depended on both the type of relationship they had with the provocateur and on the type of response (hostile, competent or passive). Children's social goals were affected by their relationship with the provocateur. Younger children's failure to display sensitivity to situational cues in previous studies is likely due to the cognitive demands of reasoning about hypothetical characters rather than an insensitivity to situational cues, per se.

"Voter Information Processing and Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.