We use a survey experiment to generate direct evidence on how people acquire and process information. Participants can buy different information signals that could help them forecast future national home prices. We elicit their valuations and exogenously vary the cost of information. Participants put substantial value on their preferred signal and, when acquired, incorporate the signal in their beliefs. However, they disagree on which signal to buy. As a result, making information cheaper does not decrease the cross-sectional dispersion of expectations. We provide a model with costly acquisition and processing of information, which can match most of our empirical results.

Do individuals care about their relative income? While this is a long-standing hypothesis, revealed-preference evidence remains elusive. We provide a unique test by studying residential choices: individuals often must choose between places with different income distributions, and as a result they “choose” their relative income. We conducted a field experiment with 1,080 senior medical students who participated in the National Resident Matching Program. We estimate their preferences by combining choice data, survey data on perceptions, and information-provision experiments. The evidence suggests that individuals care about their relative income and that these preferences differ across single and nonsingle individuals.

We propose that individuals are more politically active in more like-minded social environments. To test this hypothesis, we combine administrative data from the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Postal Service. We identify 45,000 individuals who contributed to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and changed residences either before or after the 2012 election cycle.We examine whether living in an area with a higher share of Democrats causes higher contributions to Obama. We find that conformity effects are economically significant. Additionally, we conduct counterfactual analysis that shows that these effects are important for understanding geographic polarization.