Procedura selettiva pubblica, per titoli e colloquio, per il conferimento di n. 1 assegno di ricerca della durata di 15 mesi dal titolo “Diffusione dell’informazione, reti e polarizzazione/
Information diffusion, networks and polarization” - CUP: D53D23006200006 - Responsabile Scientifico prof.ssa Carmen Marchiori
Link per la presentazione della domanda
Descrizione del programma di ricerca e dell'attività da assegnare
In the program sketched above, rational individuals choose among sources of information either based on the foreseen gain in information, or on a combination of epistemic and non-epistemic motives (having to do with some notion of identity). A third possibility worth investigating, either in itself and in combination with the other two, would take into account the cognitive costs of processing different kinds of information. After a seminal paper by Christopher Sims (2003), many economists developed models of ‘rational inattention’, in which cognitive costs are modeled in analogy with Shannon’s theory of communication costs.
We ask the winner of this research grant to:
a) Prepare a review of the literature on Information Theory, with a specific focus on the modelling of the cost of information extraction.
b) Contribute to the development of a formal framework in which both the competence/proximity trade-off and the cognitive costs of elaborating information may be simultaneously taken into account.
c) Contribute to the development of an experimental setting in which to test the explanatory power of different theories of the competence/proximity trade-off.