Planned vs. Actual Attention

Abstract

People often need to plan how to allocate their attention across different tasks. In this paper, we run two experiments to study a stylized version of this attention-allocation problem between strategic tasks. More specifically, we present subjects with pairs of 2 × 2 games, and for each pair, we give them 10 seconds to decide how they would split a fixed time budget between the two games. Then, subjects play both games without time constraints, and we use eye-tracking to estimate the fraction of time they spend on each game. We find that subjects’ planned and actual attention allocation differ and identify the determinants of this mismatch. Further, we argue that misallocations can be relevant in games in which a player’s strategy choice is sensitive to the time taken to reach a decision. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Work on this project was provided by the National Science Foundation [Grant SES 1724550] “Collaborative Research: Attention in Games and Decisions,” awarded to A. Schotter and E. R. Schotter. The work of M. Ribeiro and M. Zou was supported by the Center for Experimental Economics Social Science at New York University. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4834 .