What have you done for me lately?: release of information and strategic manipulation of memories
Recent experimental findings in psychology and neuroscience have established that the principles of repetition (rehearsal) and similarity (cue-dependence) govern the recall process for episodic memories. The author uses these principles as the building blocks in developing a formal model of memory. He then applies the model to an economic setting, by addressing the issue of how one should time a sequence of informative events, in order to manipulate the memories that a forgetful agent will eventually have. He shows that the spacing of events is crucial for what agents will remember and he characterizes the spacing properties of optimal profiles. The theoretical results apply to a wide range of social and economic applications, including political campaigns, news management prior to IPOs, marketing for new products, employee-performance evaluations and public opinion formation.
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http://flora.insead.edu/fichiersti_wp/inseadwp2002/2002-26.pdf
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