The Good News-Bad News Effect: Asymmetric Processing of Objective Information about Yourself

By David Eil, Justin M. Rao. 2011

640 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af3637e6aeba1b137baf344ea047e5a4cb702225

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In General Decision Sciences

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

The value of familiarity: Effects of knowledge and objective signals on willingness to pay for a public good (2014, background): “…and LaRiviere 2014a and Czajkowski, Hanley, and LaRiviere 2014b).11 However, evidence from laboratory experiments suggests that subjects do not always exhibit strictly Bayesian updating when exogenously provided with new information in new situations (Eil and Rao 2011 and Grossman and Owens 2012).”
Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “As such, although healthy individuals tend to protect overly optimistic beliefs about themselves by ignoring negative information (80), correlational evidence suggests that the depressed update their beliefs more pessimistically (81).”
Good news and bad news are still news: experimental evidence on belief updating (2019, positive): “Other related papers on ego relevant tasks are Buser et al. (2018), Eil and Rao (2011), Ertac (2011).”
Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases (2018, neutral): “One of these experiments found evidence of it (Charness and Dave, 2017) and two did not (Eil and Rao, 2011; Möbius, Niederle, Niehaus, and Rosenblat, 2014), but none found the opposite.”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, background): “…effect of a short-term raise of extrinsic motivation by rewards or punishments) might prove costly due to the possibility of a “crowding out” of self-confidence and intrinsic motivation n the long run.19 18 Eil and Rao (2011) provide experimental evidence for selective information processing.”
How patenting informs VC investors - The case of biotechnology (2014, background): “…contributes to an updating of the expected value of the company and a reduction of uncertainty.2 Second, proponents of the updating literature have shown that individuals react to a positive update of information stronger than to negative information (Eil and Rao, 2011; Camerer and Lovallo, 1999).”
The Price Is Right: Updating Inflation Expectations in a Randomized Price Information Experiment (2016, background): “37 However, expectation updating may be asymmetric depending on whether the information is higher or lower than respondents’ priors (Eil and Rao, 2011).”
Household Debt: Facts, Puzzles, Theories, and Policies (2015, background): “And new theories suggest that consumers may not learn about their biases even when faced with ample opportunities to do so (Ali 2011; Benjamin, Rabin, and Raymond 2013; Eil and Rao 2011; Schwartzstein forthcoming).”
Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments (2019, positive): “22 is consistent with the findings of the motivated beliefs literature (Eil and Rao, 2011; Mobius and Rosenblat, 2014).”