Effort and Accuracy in Social Preferences

People often tend to be more other-regarding in the laboratory than in the real world. This experiment uses between-subject variations of adapted dictator games to investigate thelarger complexity of finding out the consequences of one’s choices in the real world as asource for that difference. This complexity may lead to a tradeoff between effort andaccuracy, where the willingness to sacrifice accuracy in order to save effort is significantlylarger when it concerns other’s payoff than when it concerns own payoff. The experimentfinds that the lower concern for others in more opaque settings can be subscribed to strategicignorance and can be mitigated by a possibility to receive feedback on performance whilefinding out the choice consequences. This has obvious implications for the realism of futurelab experiments as well as the efficacy of fund raising applications