Neighborhood-Based Information Costs

Abstract

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based cost functions, starting from the observation that many settings involve exogenous states with a topological structure. These cost functions are uniformly posterior-separable and capture notions of perceptual distance. This second property ensures that neighborhood-based costs, unlike mutual information, make accurate predictions about behavior in perceptual experiments. We compare the implications of our neighborhood-based cost functions with those of the mutual information in a series of applications: perceptual judgments; the general environment of binary choice; regime-change games; and linear-quadratic-Gaussian settings. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.