Policy makers make decisions about a variety of payoff allocations. While policy makers should always consider maximizing the common good in their allocations, they often grapple with tradeoffs between efficiency and equality. Delving into this issue, this proposal seeks to examine factors that inhibit versus enhance the ability of third-party decision makers to maximize the common good, however unequal the payoff, by probing two central hypotheses. The first hypothesis explores how the identifiability of the would-be payoff recipient inhibits the ability of third-parties to maximize the common good (Experiments 1-4). For example, when given an opportunity to move from a suboptimal payoff scheme to a more maximizing one, we hypothesize that third-party decision makers will be less willing to maximize the common good when the payoff recipients are identified, compared to when they are not identified. The second hypothesis explores the role of deliberate ignorance on the ability to maximize the common good (Experiments 5-8). More specifically, we predict that third-party decision makers are more likely to maximize the common good when they deliberately ignore identifying information about payoff recipients, compared to when they do not. Finally, we examine how common situational factors, such as the number of payoff recipients and the social identity of the recipients, moderate the effects of identifiability and deliberate ignorance (Experiments 9-12). Broadly speaking, we aim to make contributions to both theory and practice by establishing evidence that identifiability, deliberate ignorance, and common moderators affect the ability of third-party decision makers to make efficient trade-offs.