Shooting the Messenger? Supply and Demand in Markets for Willful Ignorance

Abstract

We investigate the role of advisers in the transmission of ethically relevant information, a critical aspect of executive decision making in organizations. In our laboratory experiment, advisers are informed about the negative externalities associated with the decision-maker's choices and compete with other advisers. We find that advisers suppress about a quarter of "inconvenient" information. Suppression is not strategic, but based on the advisers' own preferences in the ethical dilemma. On the demand side, a substantial minority of decision makers avoid advisers who transmit inconvenient information (they "shoot the messenger"). Overall, by facilitating assortative matching, a competitive market for advisers efficiently caters to the demand for both information and information avoidance. Decision-makers are less likely to implement their preferred option when they are randomly matched to advisers and there is no scope for assortative matching.

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

“…8 We differentiate ourselves from these lines of research by focusing on situations in which individuals can discriminate between sources of information. In this literature, individuals have been shown to choose uninformative advisers (Shalvi et al, 2019), select positive feedback about their performance (Solda et al, 2019) or collect information on the (un)deservingness of recipients (Spiekermann and Weiss, 2016). Our findings add to this emergent literature by showing that individuals can also strategically discriminate between information sources when information relates to others' expectations.…”

Peer Behavior Profoundly Influences Dishonesty: Will Individuals Seek-out Information about Peers’ Dishonesty?

“…Prior work on willful ignorance suggest that people deliberately avoid learning some types of information. For example, to justify future selfish acts, people often prefer not to know how their actions affect others (Dana, Weber, & Kuang, 2007;Ehrich & Irwin, 2005;Grossman & Van der Weele, 2017;Shalvi, Soraperra, van der Weele, & Villeval, 2019). For instance, Dana and colleagues (2007) had participants choose between two monetary allocations, A or B.…”