Zachary Grossman

Self-Image and Willful Ignorance in Social Decisions

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or willful ignorance, is an important source of socially harmful behavior. We analyze a Bayesian signaling model of an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. We show that willful ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior by obfuscating the signal about the decision maker’s preferences, and serves to maintain the idea that the agent would have acted virtuously under full information. We derive several behavioral predictions that are inconsistent with either outcome-based preferences or social-image concern and conduct experiments to test them. Our findings, as well as a number of previous experimental results, offer support for these predictions and thus, the broader theory of self-signaling.Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or strategic ignorance, is an important source of corruption, anti-social behavior and even atrocities. We model an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benets of a personally costly action. The trade-o between self-image concerns and material payos can lead the agent to use ignorance as an excuse, even if it is deliberately chosen. Two experiments, modeled after Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007), show that a) many people will reveal relevant information about others’ payos after making an ethical decision, but not before, and b) some people are willing to pay for ignorance. These results corroborate the idea that Bayesian self-signaling drives people to avoid inconvenient facts in moral decisions.

Dual-Process Reasoning in Charitable Giving: Learning from Non-results

Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective manipulations in a giving task, and hypothesize that the affective manipulation has stronger effects when we simultaneously put the cognitive system under load. In line with earlier results, we find little evidence for dual-process reasoning in giving. Our independent treatment checks cast doubt on the effectiveness of standard treatment manipulations and show that both cognitive and affective manipulations consistently have opposite effects on the two sexes. We discuss the implications of our findings for economic experiments in this nascent research field.Previous economic experiments on dual-process reasoning in altruistic decisions have yielded inconclusive results. However, these studies do not create a conflict between affective and cognitive motives, resulting in imperfect identification. We interact standard cognitive and affective manipulations in a giving task, and hypothesize that the affective manipulation has stronger effects when we simultaneously put the cognitive system under load. In line with earlier results, we find little evidence for dual-process reasoning in giving. Our independent treatment checks cast doubt on the effectiveness of standard treatment manipulations and show that both cognitive and affective manipulations consistently have opposite effects on the two sexes. We discuss the implications of our findings for economic experiments in this nascent research field.

Land assemblage: efficiency and equity in public-private projects

One of the great successes of the law and economics movement has been the use of economic models to explain the structure and function of broad areas of law. The original contributions to this volume epitomize that tradition, offering state-of-the-art research on the many facets of economic modeling in law.