Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. Thus, when people possess information that is inconvenient for another person, they may face a dilemma about whether to inform them. We introduce a simple and portable experimental game to analyze the transmission of inconvenient information. In this game, a Sender can, at a small cost, inform a Receiver about a negative externality associated with a tempting and profitable action for the Receiver. The results from our online experiment (N = 1,512) show that Senders transmit more information when negative externalities are larger and that Senders’ decisions are largely driven by their own preferences towards the charity and their own use of information. We do not find evidence that Senders take the Receiver’s preferences into account, as they largely ignore explicit requests for information or ignorance, even if Receivers have the option to punish the Sender.

Some economic interactions are based on trust, others on monetary incentives or monitoring. In the tax compliance context, the monitoring approach creates compliance based on audits and fines (enforced compliance), in contrast to the trust-based (voluntary compliance) approach, which is based on taxpayers’ willingness to comply. Here, we examine how changes in taxation regarding platform economy revenues affect intended labor supply on such platforms. New EU legislation, effective from 2023, will mandate data sharing between platforms and tax authorities across Europe, thus resulting in increased monitoring. We investigate how this upcoming shift in monitoring power affects the intended use of platforms and how it may interact with users’ trust. We use a survey among platform workers (N = 626) in the Netherlands to examine views of the proposed regulation change, corrected for the proportion of platform income and several measures of trust. We experimentally manipulate information by either informing participants about the upcoming monitoring change or not. Results show that informing respondents about the change negatively affects expected supply of labor, and this effect is independent of respondents’ trust. We discuss the policy implications of these results.