If I close my eyes, nobody will get hurt: The effect of ignorance onn performance in a real-effort experiment

摘要

This paper tests whether choosing to stay ignorant about the negative consequences of one's own actions affects performance in a real-effort experiment. In the experiment, participants' effort increased only their own payoff or also the donation to a negatively perceived charity. We introduced ignorance by letting agents decide whether to learn if the effort benefits the charity. As expected, agents exerted significantly higher efforts if they knew the negatively perceived charity would receive