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

This paper tests whether staying ignorant about the negative consequences of one's own actions affects agents' performance in a real effort experiment. We conducted treatments in which subjects' effort either increased only one's own payoff or also increased the donation to a bad charity. Ignorance was introduced by letting agents to decide whether or not to learn if the effort benefits the charity. Overall, we find that in the conditions with complete information agents exert significantly higher efforts if there are no benefits for the bad charity. With respect to ignorance, we show that (i) almost a third of agents stay ignorant, and (ii) the ignorant agents exert significantly more effort than agents who know that their effort benefits the bad charity. We also find evidence for a sorting of low social types into ignorance, as exogenously uninformed agents exert less effort than ignorant agents.