Resumo

Given the increasing amount of information that most people face today, as well as their cognitive limitations, it is not feasible to simultaneously focus their attention on all events they face (Simon, 1955). As a result, inattention behavior may arise in distinct situations, even when people receive constant reminders to behave in a different manner. Although reminders can work in promoting rule compliance (Apesteguia, Funk, & Iriberri, 2013), there is evidence suggesting that individuals may not meet a deadline even when it is profitable to do so (Ericson, 2017).

This paper measures inattention in an information commons (libraries). We want to answer the following question: what is the extent of inattention in a real-world setting? Employing a novel dataset comprising more than 300,000 daily transactions in libraries during a 10-year period, we measure inattention as the number of borrowed books not returned when they are due per library user.

When testing for the possible occurrence of inattention in our data, we distinguish between two competing plausible explanations: one based on procrastination behavior (Ericson, 2017), and another based on strategic considerations (Guiso, Sapienza, & Zingales, 2013). If the former prevails over the second type of salient inattention, then one should expect a higher proportion of return delays on dates in which procrastination tends to be more frequent, such as days immediately before weekends, for example.

To assess the importance of inattention in this setting, we estimate the following equation via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS): Yist = α + β(Day of the Week) + Xistγ + Zstλ + δt + θst + εist. Yist represents the delay for an individual i, in library s, at instant t. The term “Day of the Week” corresponds to an indicator variable, which assumes unity value for each weekday, and 0, otherwise.

As a preview, our main results suggest that inattention, as measured by delays in returning borrowed books, is a procrastination phenomenon. These results contribute to a growing literature on the empirical measurement of inattention, with a fitting emphasis on the impact of reminders (Apesteguia et al., 2013; Ericson, 2017).

We report the occurrence of a “Friday effect”: inattention, as measured by delays in returning checked out books, is consistently higher on Fridays, when compared to the other days of the week. The results reported in this paper favor the view that inattention is a procrastination phenomenon, rather than based on strategic considerations.

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