Research
Working Papers
Self-selection of information and the belief update: An experiment on COVID-19 vaccine information
(Current Version: Dec. 24, 2023)
Rational information acquisition theory predicts that people select information that is more informative, thus people will be more persuaded by the information they select. We test the theory in a critical real-world context—information about COVID-19 vaccines. We conduct an online experiment in Taiwan where the subjects select information about COVID-19 vaccines, and then the subjects update their beliefs about the vaccine effectiveness and preferences of vaccines. As our design distinguishes different stages of the rational acquisition framework, it allows us to diagnose the underlying mechanism of the theory. Our empirical findings demonstrate evidence that people's information acquisition generally coheres with the rational theory framework predictions, that is, people choose information when the information is more likely to alter their decisions. We show that our subjects' beliefs change more when they see the information they select. We also find evidence of change in vaccine choices after they receive the information they select, which further suggests that the subjects follow the rational information acquisition framework.
Can Partisan News Shift Political Preference and Voting Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Taiwan’s General Elections 2016
We utilized the 2016 Taiwanese General Election to see how partisan news can change voters' behavior. We find that when the voters read the information in favor of their own political ideology, they were more likely to be influenced. We also find a strong "new party" effect that the information about the new parties largely persuaded the subjects to vote for the new parties. We suggest this is due to the exposure of unfamiliar information that conveyed closer political ideology to the subjects.
Preference for Sample Features and Belief Updating
with Menglong Guan, Jing Zhou, and Ravi Vora
(Preliminary version available upon request)
We conduct the canonical "balls-and-boxes" ("balls-in-urns") experiment, where we provided different types of reports about the signals. We found that people are further away from the Bayesian posterior when they receive the theoretically more informative report: the counts or the difference of the different colored balls, while receiving less the informative report of the ratio of different colored balls yields better guesses. We also elicit the subjects' willingness to pay for the reports prior to the updating tasks. We find the subjects are willing to pay more for the reports with which they perform better in the belief updating tasks.
Ongoing Project
Does the First Vote Make You Harder to Convert? An experiment using the 2021 Referendum in Taiwan
(Presented at 2023 NAESA; slides available upon request)
We used the 2021 Taiwanese Referendum to see whether the first vote will make voters harder to be persuaded. To exclude the self-selection issue from turning out and voting, we recruited students right around the eligible age and collected their voting decisions (or intentions). A few months after, we send them the information about the propositions voted in the 2021 referendum and see whether the information changes their voting decisions. We find that for fact-based propositions (energy and environment), the eligible voters are persuaded more by the information.