People tend to acquire more information while making their decisions than a rational and risk-neutral benchmark would predict. We conduct a carefully designed experiment to derive five plausible reasons for pre-decision information overpurchasing. The results show that overpurchasing of information can be almost entirely explained by systematic information processing errors (misestimation or incorrect Bayesian updating), possibly caused by biased intuitive decision processes. Other factors, such as overoptimism about the validity of the new information, risk aversion, ambiguity aversion, and curiosity about (irrelevant) information, play at most a minor role. Our results imply that information overacquisitions are mainly driven by the overestimation of the usefulness of additional information.

人们在做出决策时往往会获得比理性和风险中性基准所预测的更多的信息。我们进行了精心设计的实验，以得出导致决策前信息过度购买的五个合理原因。结果表明，信息的过度购买几乎可以完全由系统信息处理错误（错误估计或不正确的贝叶斯更新）来解释，这可能是由有偏见的直觉决策过程引起的。其他因素，例如对新信息有效性的过度乐观、风险厌恶、歧义厌恶和好奇心关于（不相关的）信息，最多起次要作用。我们的结果意味着信息过度获取主要是由对附加信息有用性的高估造成的。