Strategic ignorance and procedural fairness preferences

Ferdinand A. von Siemens

Economics Letters, 2024, vol. 242, issue C

Abstract: This paper shows that procedural fairness concerns might be a possible explanation for strategic ignorance, that is, that some people avoid information on how their behavior might hurt others. Decision makers with procedural fairness preferences suffer disutility from inequality in ex-ante expected payoffs. Such preferences lead to strategic ignorance if decision makers are in some sense focused on extremes: they generally dislike inequality in expected payoffs, but care little about changes in intermediate inequality. Importantly, this property does not imply a particular curvature of the loss function measuring the suffering from inequality. The theoretical possibility result suggests that more empirical research on strategic ignorance might be warranted.

Keywords: Strategic ignorance; Procedural fairness; Self-signaling; Decision under uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D80 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176524003331
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:242:y:2024:i:c:s0165176524003331

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2024.111849

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().