Exley and Kessler (2021) on Information Avoidance

Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler, “Information Avoidance and Image Concerns.” NBER Working Paper 28376, January 2021 (revised May 2021).

• Contrary to what a standard economic view would suggest, people often avoid receiving information that is pertinent and seemingly free. A plethora of potential reasons can be offered as explanations for information avoidance.

• People want to think well of themselves, so they might like to muddy the waters around selfish acts, by remaining ignorant (thereby possessing plausible deniability) of the actual extent of their selfishness. This article asks how much information avoidance is driven by concerns with maintaining one’s self-image.

• More specifically, people often avoid learning about how their choices affect the outcomes for other people – even if the information would not affect their decision. When I intend to act selfishly, I might not want to know how much others are harmed by my choice. The opportunity to avoid information about harms to others promotes more selfish behavior. 

• The approach here is to look at information avoidance with respect to two decisions that differ only in that one decision has no prospect of involving a selfish motive (as the chooser's own payoff is not implicated in the decision).  

• A person is asked to choose either option A or option B. The "Self/Other condition" is one in which the chooser will receive a higher payoff from A than for B. Their choice between A or B, however, will also affect the payoff of someone else ("Other"), and it is possible that the other person will receive a much higher payoff with B. At the start, the chooser does no know what option is best for the other person, but does know that A is best for the chooser him or her self. The chooser (sometimes) has the option of just making the choice between A or B, or, learning the Other's payoffs associated with A or B. Will the chooser seek to learn this information?

• If Self and Other turn out to both do better with A, that is termed the "aligned" state; if it turns out that Other prefers option B, that is the "unaligned" state, the preferences of the two folks do not match. (So choosing to get the info means that the chooser learns whether the preferences are aligned or unaligned – if they are aligned, then there is no conflict, the selfish choice is also good for the Other.)

• In the Other/Other condition, alternatively, the chooser is again making a choice in the Self/Other circumstances, except what used to be the chooser's payoffs now go to someone else, a third party – the chooser has no skin in the game, no selfish interest, but the interests of the two Others might conflict. Will the chooser elect to learn whether the interest are aligned or unaligned?

• Four studies, overall n > 4,600.

• In Self/Other, if choosers know (no choice) the info and it is unaligned, about 1/3 make the selfish choice. If the state information is not revealed unless requested, 2/3 of subjects in Self/Other choose not to acquire the information. If the choosers elect not to know, more than half choose the selfish option. That is, people who avoid the info behave in a more selfish way, on average, than if their choice fully revealed their selfishness because of their knowledge of unalignment.

• In the Other/Other condition, where there is no selfish option, information avoidance falls – but only by about 20%; that is, more than half the participants still choose to avoid the information. 

• The Other/Other results suggest that most of the information avoidance is not about self-image concerns, because there are no such concerns in the Other/Other condition.

• If you make info provision an active choice (as opposed to opt-in), information avoidance falls by about half: it sort of seems like participants just aren’t paying much attention without the need to make an active choice?