ChienHsun Lin

Biography

ChienHsun is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from National Taiwan University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Philosophy and a Master of Arts in Economics.

Research

ChienHsun is interested in topics related to behavioral economics and research using experimental methods. Currently, he works on projects that study how people update their beliefs with information, and how the update is influenced by people's preferences. His projects include both laboratory experiments and experiments under field contexts.

Job Market Paper Abstract

"The Self-Selection of Information and the Belief Update: An Experiment On COVID-19 Vaccine Information"

Does the self-selection of information influence how people update their beliefs? We conduct an online experiment in Taiwan where we provide information about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines to participants. We elicit our subjects’ information preference for different vaccines with an incentive-compatible experiment design. Then we assign the subjects to information about vaccines randomly. Before and after the subjects read the information, we ask the subjects to report their beliefs about vaccine effectiveness to examine how much the information updates their beliefs. We have three main findings: i) the subjects prefer the information about the vaccines that they believe are the best, ii) the subjects are persuaded more by the requested vaccine information, and iii) when there is a positive update in beliefs of vaccine effectiveness, subjects’ preferences for the vaccine increase. We also find that when the subjects receive the information about the vaccine they selected, their preference for it increases. We propose a model of information acquisition with Bayesian agents, and we find the agent is more willing to consume the information when the information is more likely to alter the agent’s decision (either when the prior belief is less accurate or when the belief is closer to the status-quo value). Using this fact, we conclude that the update will be larger when the agent receives the selected information. Our empirical findings match the model predictions.