The Economics of Curiosity

• 영문명: The Economics of Curiosity
• 발행기관: 한국계량경제학회
• 저자명: Jeong-Yoo Kim Haeree Lee Insik Min
• 간행물 정보: 『한국계량경제학회 학술대회 논문집』2009년 공동학술대회, 1~36쪽, 전체 36쪽
• 주제분류: 경제경영 > 경제학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2008.11.30

영문 초록

We develop the hypothesis that an individual can get some value of information, even if they do not use the information for his subsequent decision, contrary to the expected utility theory. Curiosity is associated with the direct utility from information and is defined formally by using the concept of entropy. We can measure an agent’s curiosity level by the maximum amount of money that he is willing to pay in order to obtain the information thereby reducing the entropy. We test the hypothesis from lab experiments and obtain the empirical evidence that people are actually willing to pay a positive amount of money to obtain payoff-irrelevant information. Also, the comparison of the coefficients of variation for our curiosity measure and the IPI curiosity measure which is widely used in psychology suggests that our measure is more informative.

목차

1 Introduction

2 Entropy and Curiosity

3 Noisy Signal

4 Experimental Evidences

5 Economic Applications

6 Relation with the Expected Utility Theory

7 Conclusion

키워드

Curiosity Entropy Expected Utility Shannon Value