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We investigate how people make choices when they are unsure about the value of the options they face. At any moment in time they can make a decision or choose to wait and acquire more information before making their mind. We design a laboratory experiment to study whether human behaviour is able to approximate the optimal solution to this problem. We find that participants deviate from the optimal strategy in a systematic manner: they acquire too much information when it is costly and not enough when it is cheap. With time, participants tend to learn, without converging towards equilibrium. This deviation costs participants between 10% and 25% of their potential payoffs. We examine various explanations to our results, and find that the most likely one is that participants exhibit a confirmation bias.
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