Why Good Experience Can End Joint Activity

Abstract

Learning a partner's preferences through joint activity can make both partners worse off than receiving no feedback from the activity. We study a responder who values the partner's payoff but bears a cost when joining is attributed to personal interest. Both partners observe noisy evidence of whether the responder wanted the activity, available only after participation. Evidence of interest raises this cost, discouraging joining on unwanted days; joining only on wanted days would then be too revealing to sustain. With choices based on current payoffs, we derive a condition under which learning can end participation without ever making stopping beneficial to either partner. Feedback accuracy and preference persistence described by couples' diaries satisfy this condition at baseline payoffs. Once activity stops, no further evidence arrives and the belief that the responder generally wants the activity stays fixed, so waiting may never restore it; preference information available without participating can. A separate forward-looking model with highly persistent preferences shows why this remedy can also reduce joint welfare. When participation reveals preferences exactly, a responder may accept at a current loss to establish a lack of interest, making acceptance less revealing and so sustaining participation on wanted days. Free daily revelation outside the activity removes this incentive. At the model's baseline, it lowers the best joint value in monotone Markov equilibria with exact participation feedback, but raises it with feedback as weak as the diary's.