Self-Image and Willful Ignorance in Social Decisions
Zachary Grossman (zgrossman@ucmerced.edu) and
Joël J. van der Weele
Journal of the European Economic Association, 2017, vol. 15, issue 1, 173-217
Abstract:
Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or willful ignorance, is an important source of socially harmful behavior. To understand this issue, we analyze a Bayesian signaling model of an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. We show that willful ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior by obfuscating the signal about the decision-maker's preferences, and help maintain the idea that the agent would have acted virtuously under full information. We derive several behavioral predictions that are inconsistent with either outcome-based preferences or social-image concern and conduct experiments to test them. Our findings, as well as a number of previous experimental results, offer support for these predictions and thus, the broader theory of self-signaling.
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (177)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvw001 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
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:oup:jeurec:v:15:y:2017:i:1:p:173-217.
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg
More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press (joanna.bergh@oup.com).