Preferences for Non-Instrumental Information and Skewness∗

We present experimental results from a broad investigation of intrinsic preferences for information. We examine whether people prefer negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures when they are equally informative, whether people prefer Blackwell more informative information structures, and how individual preferences over the skewness and the degree of information relate to one another. The wide scope of our investigation not only reveals new insights regarding intrinsic preferences for information, but as we show, also allows for testing of existing models in this domain. We find that models based on the framework of Kreps and Porteus (1978) and Caplin and Leahy (2001), are the most consistent with the data we observe. ∗We thank the Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics, Ross School of Business Faculty Grant Fund, and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund for support. We thank seminar participants at Microsoft, University of Michigan, University of Pittsburgh, Risk, Uncertainty and Decision 2015, FICS, as well as David Dillenberger, Kfir Eliaz, David Gill, David Huffman and John Leahy for helpful comments. Remaining errors are ours alone. †Email: [email protected] ‡Email: [email protected] §Email: [email protected].