Beyond Value: On the Role of Symmetry in Demand for Information

We study demand for symmetric and asymmetric information sources in the laboratory. Although participants respond to incentives and instrumental considerations, they exhibit a systematic bias towards symmetric sources. These patterns persist among individuals with higher cognitive abilities and better task comprehension, and they are not accounted for by their elicited subjective beliefs.

This paper was accepted by Dorothea Kübler, behavioural economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This project was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research [Grant SG171679]. R. Z. acknowledges support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 524/24].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.08449.