 Avoiding the cost of your conscience: belief dependent preferences and information acquisitionClaire Rimbaud and Alice Soldà Post-Print from HAL Abstract: Pro-social individuals typically face a trade-off between their monetary incentives and their other-regarding preferences. When this is the case, they may be tempted to exploit the uncertainty in their decision environment to reconcile this trade-off. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals with belief-dependent preferences acquire information about others' expectations in a self-serving way. We present a model of endogenous information acquisition and test our theoretical predictions in an online experiment based on a modified trust-game in which the trustee is uncertain about the trustor's expectations. Our experimental design enables us to identify participants with belief-based preferences and investigate their information acquisition strategy. Consistent with our predictions for subjective belief-dependent preferences, we find that most individuals classified as belief-dependent strategically select their source of information to avoid the cost of their conscience. Keywords: Belief-dependent preferences; Information acquisition; Self-serving biases; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Experimental Economics, 2024, 27 (3) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04702729 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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