TY  - RPRT
A1  - Bruttel, Lisa Verena
A1  - Felgendreher, Simon
A1  - Güth, Werner
A1  - Hertwig, Ralph
T1  - Strategic ignorance in repeated prisoners’ dilemma experiments and its effects on the dynamics of voluntary cooperation
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Being ignorant of key aspects of a strategic interaction can represent an advantage rather than a handicap. We study one particular context in which ignorance can be beneficial: iterated strategic interactions in which voluntary cooperation may be sustained into the final round if players voluntarily forego knowledge about the time horizon. We experimentally examine this option to remain ignorant about the time horizon in a finitely repeated two-person prisoners’ dilemma game. We confirm that pairs without horizon knowledge avoid the drop in cooperation that otherwise occurs toward the end of the game. However, this effect is superposed by cooperation declining more rapidly in pairs without horizon knowledge during the middle phase of the game, especially if players do not know that the other player also wanted to remain ignorant of the time horizon.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 10 
KW  - strategic ignorance
KW  - cooperation
KW  - prisoners' dilemma
KW  - experiment
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-431881
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 10
ER  - 
TY  - RPRT
A1  - Bruttel, Lisa Verena
A1  - Güth, Werner
A1  - Hertwig, Ralph
A1  - Orland, Andreas
T1  - Do people harness deliberate ignorance to avoid envy and its detrimental effects?
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Envy is an unpleasant emotion. If individuals anticipate that comparing their payoff with the (potentially higher) payoff of others will make them envious, they may want to actively avoid information about other people’s payoffs. Given the opportunity to reduce another person’s payoff, an individual’s envy may trigger behavior that is detrimental to welfare. In this case, if individuals anticipate that they will react in a welfare-reducing way, they may also avoid information about other people’s payoffs from the outset. We investigated these two hypotheses using three experiments. We found that 13% of our potentially envious subjects avoided information when they did not have the opportunity to reduce another participant’s payoff. Psychological scales do not explain this behavior. We also found that voluntarily uninformed subjects did neither deduct less of the payoff nor less frequently than subjects who could not avoid the information.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 17 
KW  - envy
KW  - emotion regulation
KW  - deliberate ignorance
KW  - punishment
KW  - experiment
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-444463
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 17
ER  -