In the field of financial theory, Hirschleifer and Teoh (2003) analyze the implications of investors’ limited attention for firms’ information policy and financial market equilibrium.Ģ The notion of attention is however an old concept in social sciences. Applied to macroeconomic policy, this problem is coined as rational inattention 2 and has been put forward by central bankers as one of the lessons to be drawn from the 2008 financial crisis (Trichet, 2010 3 ) and by some economists (Akerlof, Dickens and Perry, 2000 Sims, 2003 Shiller, 1997) as an alternative to the assumption of rational expectations for inflation forecasts notably. As anticipated by Camerer (2003), it has become one of the most important topics of behavioural economics 1. Quite some economists have addressed the problem of limited attention and its economic consequences. The rising activity of bloggers or the intense use of social networks ( Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the last decade is a clear indication of the fact that attention (rather than information or knowledge) has become a critical economic resource for decision-making.
3 The following statement by Trichet in his opening address dedicated to “Lessons from the crisis for (.)ġ The “economics of attention” increasingly gained importance in academic research since the first appearance of the term in 1997 in a seminal on-line article by M ichael Goldhaber where he defined it as a sub-field of the “Internet economics”, focusing on the time-consuming dimension of overflowing information.2 Rational inattention deals with the issue of which parts of macroeconomic data should rational agen (.).1 “Another interesting psychological concept, neglected in behavioral economics until recently, is li (.).