Influence of the Information Background on the Economic Behavior of Households

Abstract

The article is devoted to the role of the information background in household decisions on consumption-savings. The issue of behavioral prerequisites for decision-making has lately become the mainstream of economic theory. The crisis of the “absolutely rational subject” as a concept led to the development of theories of bounded rationality and to the search for noneconomic determinants of micro- and macroeconomic processes. As a result of interdisciplinary studies conducted at the intersection of psychology, sociology, political science and economics, modern economic theory has been enriched with new approaches and concepts that better describe the reality than models based on the axiom of homo economicus. The main limitations of the rationality of economic entities include the imperfection of information that is available and is at the same time reliable, as well as the necessary costs of its processing plus the probability of errors. The present study is intended to make a contribution to this theory by investigating the impact of the information component in the form of economic news on the behavior of Russian households in terms of disposition of available incomes. The research was based on a selection of news for 2006–2016 by the main television channels of the Russian Federation — the most accessible and trustworthy source of information for households according to public opinion polls. The news was evaluated as negative or positive with the help of linguistic and semantic analysis, and afterwards an econometric analysis of the relationship with economic indicators was performed. It turned out that an increase in uncertainty (expansion of the “spread of negativity and positivity” news) leads to a choice in favor of current consumption, which leads to a reduction of savings as the national investment base. In addition, the authors analyzed the relationship between the tonality of news and its dynamics with the business cycle. The analysis revealed that the “information” cycle correlates, with a certain lag, with the business cycle.