Willingness to Pay Attention for Others: Do Social Preferences Predict Attentional Contribution?

Abstract

We investigate the relation between elicited social preferences and attentional contribution in a pro-social environment. For this purpose, we propose a new experiment, namely the ?dustbin task?, where subjects invest real attention to reduce uncertainty in a discrimination task. We compare three different incentivized environments where the subject?s accuracy: do not impact on thier or other subjects? payoffs (T0), impact their payoff only (Self-Interested treatment T1) and impact other subjects? payoff only (Prosocial treatment T2). Our results show that both incentives (T1?and T2) increase the amount of allocated attention, regardless of the subject?s intrinsic motivation. We elicited subject social preferences and find that they cannot explain attentional contribution in pro-social environments (T2). This latter result, in contradiction with economic theory, provides new insight about social-preferences and attention allocation.