At Least I Tried: Partial Willful Ignorance, Information Acquisition, and Social Preferences

J. Braxton Gately

Review of Behavioral Economics, 2023, vol. 10, issue 3, 163-187

Abstract: Agents cannot always choose to avoid all information about the outcomes of their decisions; this phenomenon remains understudied in the literature on willful ignorance. I use a modified dictator-game laboratory experiment to investigate how ignorant agents are willing to be about the effects of their actions when they must know at least some information about the outcomes of their actions. Dictators choose between two allocations and know recipients' payouts in one allocation, but not the other; they may acquire signals about the unknown allocation. Dictators are more likely to acquire additional signals when they believe the unknown allocation is relatively egalitarian, though this diminishes in the number of signals acquired. There is significant heterogeneity in search behavior and evidence of nuance in motivated behavior.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/105.00000167 (application/xml)

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:now:jnlrbe:105.00000167

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Behavioral Economics from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().