Embezzlement and Guilt Aversion

Attanasi, Giuseppe; Rimbaud, Claire; Villeval, Marie Claire

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3169219

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Ann holds private expectations 1 For instance, people donate positive amounts of money to others without any strategic incentives to do so (Forsythe et al, 1994) or prefer more equitable monetary allocations over selfish ones (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999;Bolton and Ockenfels, 2000). People donate more when their recipient expects to receive more (Bellemare et al, 2018;Attanasi et al, 2019), or lie less often when others' can infer their degree of dishonesty (Dufwenberg and Dufwenberg, 2018) 2 Throughout this paper we refer to this term more loosely as preferences that fade away in the presence of uncertainty in the decision environment. In particular, we use the concept of "subjective" preferences introduced by Spiekermann and Weiss (2016) to describe preferences defined over the epistemic state of the world rather than the actual state of the world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding the Cost of your Conscience: Belief Dependent Preferences and Information Acquisition

2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pro-social individuals face a trade-off between their monetary and moral motives. Hence, they may be tempted to exploit the uncertainty in their decision environment in order to reconcile this trade-off. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals with belief-dependent preferences avoid the monetary cost of behaving according to their moral standards by strategically acquiring information about others'expectations. We test the predictions of an information acquisition model in an online experiment. We use a modified trust-game in which we introduce uncertainty about the second movers' beliefs about first-movers' expectations. Our design enables to (i) identify participants with belief-based preferences and (ii) investigate their information acquisition strategy.Consistent with our predictions of subjective preferences, we find that most individuals classified as belief-dependent strategically select their source of information to avoid the cost of their conscience.

show abstract