Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 831

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 163 of the 163 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Information Avoidance

Open access
Golman, Russell, Hagmann, David, Loewenstein, George·2017·Journal of Economic Literature
DOI 10.1257/jel.20151245
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is useful, free, and independent of strategic considerations. We review research documenting the occurrence of information avoidance, as well as theoretical and empirical research on reasons why people avoid information, drawing from economics, psychology, and other disciplines. The review concludes with a discussion of some of the diverse (and often costly) individual and societal consequences of information avoidance. (JEL D82, D83)

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1257/jel.20151245

Cites

163 of 163 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 163 references

Cited by

See all 831

Metadata

Authors
Golman, R., Hagmann, D., & Loewenstein, G.
Venue
Journal of Economic Literature
Publisher
American Economic Association
Published
2017-03-01
Volume
55
Issue
1
Pages
96-135
ISSN
0022-0515 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1257/jel.20151245
OpenAlex
W4238212557
Cited by
831
References
163
FWCI
39.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Information Avoidance. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/jel.20151245
The paper
Golman, R., Hagmann, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2017). Information Avoidance. Journal of Economic Literature. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20151245

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.