Economists formalize what good questions to ask before acting — and it matters more now

Economists have built a formal model for how to decide which questions are worth asking before making a big decision, especially when you don't know which questions will actually matter. The model shows that as information gets cheaper and more abundant, the real bottleneck becomes knowing what to ask, not finding answers.

For decades, economics treated decision-making as a problem of acquiring information — more data, better models, faster answers. But in practice, when you're diagnosing a problem or planning a complex decision, the hard part is often figuring out which questions are diagnostic at all. This paper shows that's a distinct economic problem with its own logic, not just a side effect of having bad data. It matters because it shifts where the costs and bottlenecks actually are: not in getting answers, but in organizing the inquiry itself. As AI makes generating answers trivially cheap, this margin becomes the real constraint.