Testing models of information avoidance with binary choice dictator gamesLauren Feiler Journal of Economic Psychology, 2014, vol. 45, issue C, 253-267 Abstract: Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007) to better study information avoidance in an experimental setting. Subjects are given the chance to avoid information about a recipient’s payoffs in a dictator game. I vary the probability that a dictator’s payoffs will be aligned with the recipient’s in order to assess the role of beliefs on avoidance and test contradictory models. The within-subjects approach shows that even people who are generous in a stark choice will make self-serving decisions when they can avoid knowing the recipient’s outcome. People avoid information more often when the self-serving choice is unlikely to hurt the recipient, which supports Rabin’s model (1995) of moral rules and moral preferences. Keywords: Information aversion; Avoidance behavior; Belief manipulation; Moral rules; Reluctant altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:45:y:2014:i:c:p:253-267 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2014.10.003 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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