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

Abstract

I investigate whether remaining partially ignorant of the consequences of one’s decision leads to a decrease in prosocial behavior using a laboratory experiment in the style of Dana et al. (2007)’s dictator game experiment, where the dictator can choose whether or not to know the recipient’s payoffs. By introducing a noisy signal about the recipient’s payoffs in one state of the world, I investigate how much information dictators will acquire. I find support for my model’s predictions that information acquisition will be decreasing in costs of information acquisition (the number of signals acquired is significantly greater when information is free than when it is costly), in- creasing in beliefs that the agent’s actions are prosocial (subjects are 56.8% more likely to choose the prosocial distribution when it is revealed), and increasing in the expected prosociality of the available choices (subjects who believe the noisy state is prosocial acquire an additional signal, on average, relative to those who do not). There is evidence that subjects use search to excuse selfish behavior - subjects who choose the hidden distribution when the revealed distribution is prosocial are 20.1% more likely to have searched than those who do not. These findings, taken together, provide sup- port for the intuition that agents often look for opportunities to maintain a veil of ignorance, such that they experience utility from the outcome of their decision, even if their actions are selfish.