Abstract: The same underlying data can be communicated or perceived in different formats. A natural question is whether people prefer the formats that serve them best. We study five different summary reports of a series of binary signals in the canonical belief updating setting: Majority (which signal type appeared more often), Percentage (the percentage of each signal type), Difference (how many more of the dominant type), Count (the number of each type), and Sequence (the raw sequence of the signals). These reports differ in two key dimensions: instrumental value (IV) and information richness (IR). In an online experiment (N=200), we elicit subjects' preference (WTP) for the reports and measure their belief-updating performance across the reports. Our main finding is a systematic misalignment between preference and performance. WTP rises with both IV and IR, while the standard economic theory only considers IV. Performance, in contrast, improves with IV but deteriorates with IR, conditional on IV; that is, participants perform worse with the very reports they pay more to receive. There is heterogeneity in preference, but the misalignment between preference and performance is robust across subgroups. Together, these results indicate that demand for information is shaped by features that go beyond instrumental value, and that people have imperfect meta-cognition about their own belief-updating behavior.

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