On The Relevance Of Irrelevant Information

This paper analyses the role of information in the search process. I build a simple model of a good with two random attributes with some joint probability distribution. I consider seemingly unimportant changes in this distribution, i.e. changes which neither affect expected utility nor its variance. These changes have a great impact on the search behaviour: the customer may start to search the characteristics and buy the good even if she did not do so before. The optimal search rule is derived and the model is generalized to multiple objects