«Essays on Information Preferences and Morality»
On Monday 26 April 2021 Fehime Ceren Ay will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
«Information preferences: implications for business»
Trial lecture:
10:15, Zoom video conference, NHH
Title of the thesis:
«Essays on Information Preferences and Morality»
Summary:
The thesis consists of four papers mainly focusing on information preferences: When and whether people want to know about the consequences of a decision for others, do people collect additional information to justify their decisions and do they want to know personally sensitive information that that they can benefit financially.
The first three chapters aim to provide answers to how people make such decisions, and the last chapter presents a study in collaboration with a group of international researchers on national identity and its effects on the support for Covid-19 policies.
The first chapter is titled “Information and Strategic Avoidance in Reciprocal Decisions”.This chapter presents results from a laboratory experiment and shows that people avoid information that can make them feel compelled to reciprocate (by showing potential cause for the trusting partner) even after the decision is already made. This chapter shows that in trust based social relations people do not make their decisions with first order social preferences on equality and selfishness, but also with thinking about what kind of characteristics such decision would show to themselves.
The second chapter is titled as “Strategic Curiosity: An Experimental Study of Curiosity and Dishonesty” and is in collaboration with Katrine B. Nødvedt and Joel W. Berge. This chapter presents results from an online experiment on a novel phenomenon concerning information preferences: People strategically collect additional non-instrumental information to justify morally questionable decisions.
The third chapter, “Investigating Motivations for Information Avoidance—The Role of Certainty, Rewards and Overconfidence”, is in collaboration with Stefan Meißner. The results from a laboratory experiment show that people avoid learning their relative score in an intelligence test, even when learning can increase monetary gain. This paper shows that information preferences – when the information is related to concerns about self-image – significantly differ from such preferences about neutral information.
The fourth chapter presents results from a research collaboration with researchers from 67 countries and shows that national identity is a strong indicator of the support for Covid-19 policies.
Defense:
Monday 26 April 12:15, Zoom video conference, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Kjetil Bjorvatn, Department of Economics, NHH (leader of the committee)
Professor Shaul Shalvi, University of Amsterdam
Associate Professor Mette Trier Damgaard, Aarhus University
Supervisors:
Professor Erik Ø. Sørensen, Department of Economics and Norwegian Centre of Excellence FAIR
Professor Pedro Dal Bó, Brown University
The trial lecture and thesis defence will be open to the public.