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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Published in | Economics letters Vol. 242; p. 111849 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Elsevier B.V
01.09.2024
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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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. |
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ISSN: | 0165-1765 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.econlet.2024.111849 |