Outside Event: Economics Seminar Series with Tommaso Denti, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University

Tommaso Denti, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, NYU will be presenting: Modeling Information Acquisition Via F-Divergence and Duality.   This seminar will present new theoretical work on flexible information acquisition, with a focus on advancing the rational inattention literature beyond the limitations of entropy-based models. While traditional approaches quantify information costs using mutual information, offering tractability but relying on restrictive functional form assumptions, this paper introduces a novel duality-based framework grounded in f-divergence—a more general class of information measures. The approach preserves much of the analytical convenience of the canonical model while allowing for greater flexibility in characterizing information costs. The seminar will highlight how this framework nests existing models, opens up new comparative statics, and broadens the applicability of rational inattention in economic environments involving decision-making under uncertainty.

Dr. Denti’s research interests are in information economics and decision-making under uncertainty. Motivated by the challenges and opportunities of the digital economy, his work seeks to understand how economic agents acquire, process, and use information in complex environments. Two recent papers investigate models of “rational inattention” in strategic settings; applications include labor market discrimination, online advertising, and communication.

LOCATION:  Rawls Hall Room 2058