I think bracketing agents could be moved to bracket out and ignore value of information sometimes and more often than EV-maxers, but it’s worth breaking things down further to see when. Imagine we’re considering an intervention with:
Direct effects on a group of moral patients (or locations of value), and we’re clueless about those effects.
Some (expected) value of information for another group of moral patients (possibly the same group, a disjoint group or intersecting the group in 1).
Then:
a. If the group in 2 is disjoint from the group in 1, then we can bracket out those affected in 1 and decide just on the basis of the expected value of information in 2 (and opportunity costs).
b. If the group in 2 is a subset of the group in 1, then the minimum expected value of information needs to be high enough to overcome the potential expected worst case downsides from the direct effects on the group in 1, for the intervention to beat doing nothing. The VOI can get bracketed away and ignored along with the direct effects in 1.
And there are intermediate cases, with probably intermediate recommendations.
(Edited to elaborate.)
I think bracketing agents could be moved to bracket out and ignore value of information sometimes and more often than EV-maxers, but it’s worth breaking things down further to see when. Imagine we’re considering an intervention with:
Direct effects on a group of moral patients (or locations of value), and we’re clueless about those effects.
Some (expected) value of information for another group of moral patients (possibly the same group, a disjoint group or intersecting the group in 1).
Then:
a. If the group in 2 is disjoint from the group in 1, then we can bracket out those affected in 1 and decide just on the basis of the expected value of information in 2 (and opportunity costs).
b. If the group in 2 is a subset of the group in 1, then the minimum expected value of information needs to be high enough to overcome the potential expected worst case downsides from the direct effects on the group in 1, for the intervention to beat doing nothing. The VOI can get bracketed away and ignored along with the direct effects in 1.
And there are intermediate cases, with probably intermediate recommendations.