Strategic ignorance and procedural fairness preferences

This paper shows that procedural fairness concerns might be a possible explanation for strategic ignorance, that is, that some people avoid information on how their behavior might hurt others. Decision makers with procedural fairness preferences suffer disutility from inequality in ex-ante expected...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEconomics letters Vol. 242; p. 111849
Main Author von Siemens, Ferdinand A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.09.2024
Subjects
Decision under uncertainty
Procedural fairness
Self-signaling
Strategic ignorance
Self-signaling
C91
D90
Strategic ignorance
Decision under uncertainty
D80
Procedural fairness
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Summary:This paper shows that procedural fairness concerns might be a possible explanation for strategic ignorance, that is, that some people avoid information on how their behavior might hurt others. Decision makers with procedural fairness preferences suffer disutility from inequality in ex-ante expected payoffs. Such preferences lead to strategic ignorance if decision makers are in some sense focused on extremes: they generally dislike inequality in expected payoffs, but care little about changes in intermediate inequality. Importantly, this property does not imply a particular curvature of the loss function measuring the suffering from inequality. The theoretical possibility result suggests that more empirical research on strategic ignorance might be warranted. •Some people want to behave selfishly without bad conscience.•They thus avoid information on how their behavior might hurt others.•Procedural fairness concerns can explain such strategic ignorance.
ISSN:0165-1765
DOI:10.1016/j.econlet.2024.111849