ALEXANDER W. BLOEDEL CONTACT Department of Economics
[email protected] Stanford University https://web.stanford.edu/~abloedel/ 579 Jane Stanford Way +1 (203) 807-2858 Stanford, CA 94305-6072 EDUCATION PhD in Economics, Stanford University, 2021 (expected). BS in Economics, BA in Physics, Minor in Math, Duke University, 2014. REFERENCES Prof. Ilya Segal (Primary) Prof. Paul Milgrom Economics Department, Stanford University Economics Department, Stanford University +1 (650) 724-4905 +1 (650) 723-3397
[email protected] [email protected] Prof. B. Douglas Bernheim Economics Department, Stanford University +1 (650) 723-3397
[email protected] RESEARCH AND TEACHING FIELDS Primary fields: Microeconomic Theory, Information Economics, Mechanism Design. Secondary fields: Decision Theory, Behavioral Economics. JOB MARKET PAPER “The Cost of Optimally Acquired Information” (with Weijie Zhong) This paper develops a theory for the expected cost of optimally acquired information when information can be acquired sequentially and there is no explicit cost of delay. We study the “reduced-form” Indirect Cost functions for information generated by sequential minimization of a “primitive” Direct Cost function. The class of Indirect Costs is characterized by a recursive condition called Sequential Learning- Proofness. This condition is inconsistent with Prior Invariance: Indirect Costs must depend on the decision-maker’s prior beliefs. We show that Sequential Learning-Proofness provides partial optimality foundations for the Uniformly Posterior Separable (UPS) cost functions used in the rational inattention literature: a cost function is UPS if and only if it is an Indirect Cost that (i) satisfies a mild regularity condition or, equivalently, (ii) is 1 generated (only) by Direct Costs for which the optimal sequential strategy involves observing only Gaussian diffusion signals.