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Assessing Axioms of Theories of Limited Attention

Nuttaporn Rochanahastin

 Abstract

It is very likely that many decisions in the individual choice setting are made without a complete or exhaustive deliberation process. One of the plausible explanations for this behaviour, that has recently received much recognition in economics, is that people have limited attention. This assumption has motivated many new theories, more and more of which are founded on axioms. This research experimentally test two of these new theories, those of  Masatlioglu et al. (2012), and Lleras et al. (2017), which are based on the revealed preference framework. This paper uses standard choice data to determine the (relative) validity of their underlying axioms, compared to a benchmark of the violation rate given by random behaviour. The results show that Masatlioglu et al. (2012) appears to be the empirically more plausible weakening of WARP.

 

The Paper (MS Word , 284kb)

The Attention Mail Files (zip , 970kb) can be found here.