Volunteering and the Strategic Value of Ignorance

1 Introduction

Dragon-slaying and ballroom dancing are two famous examples¹ for the provision of
a public good that induces a positive value for a certain group of individuals. One of
the individuals, however, has to pay some cost in order to provide the public good.
Such situations are often best described by a war of attrition: one volunteer is needed
for a certain task, and everyone prefers someone else to volunteer first and bear the
cost of provision. Typically, there is a disutility or waiting cost attached to the time
until a volunteer is found. In this paper, we study the individuals’ incentives to
obtain information about their own cost of provision of the public good prior to a
volunteering game or war of attrition.

Wars of attrition are used to model a large number of applications from different
fields. Besides dragon-slaying, many unpleasant situations like intervening in a fight,
calling the police in case of a fire or crime, household chores, fights between animals,
or market exit exhibit properties of wars of attrition.² Organizations typically rely
on the voluntary performance of a large number of tasks. These tasks may have to be
performed repeatedly, and the cost of performing the task may then be well-known.
But often the individuals don’t know exactly how costly volunteering will turn out to
be. They may, for instance, only have a guess about the time involved in chairing a
university department or organizing a conference, but can acquire information about
this expenditure of time.

In many companies or institutions, staff meetings take place on a regular basis
and are used to allocate tasks to individuals. Before volunteering to perform a task,
employees typically have the possibility to find out about their cost of performing this
task, and they can do so by asking questions and collecting information. The ques-
tion, however, is what impact information acquisition has on the volunteering game
and whether individuals benefit from information acquisition. If such information
acquisition can be observed by the other individuals - for instance when employees
ask questions - there is a strategic value attached to the information: it can be used

¹Cf. Bliss and Nalebuff (1984).

²Many more examples are given, e.g., by Bilodeau and Slivinski (1996), LaCasse et al. (2002),
or Otsubo and Rapoport (2008).

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