The information acquisition process has received attention in the budgeting literature for its effect on self-interested reporting by managers. One finding from this research is that information acquisition increases managers’ psychological ownership over the information, which in turn increases their sense of deservingness, particularly when honesty is not a salient feature of the reporting context. I experimentally investigate whether separating the tasks of information acquisition and reporting between roles within an organization reduces the opportunism commonly observed in budgeting experiments. Using social norm theory, I argue that observing the effortful information acquisition of a peer manager serves as a situational cue which activates a norm of responsibility in the reporting manager. I test the prediction using a two-cell experimental design in which I manipulate whether the reporting manager is exogenously endowed with private cost information or receives a private communication from a peer manager who acquires the information through effort. I find that opportunism is significantly reduced when the cost information is generated by a peer manager, in line with my prediction. However, contrary to my theory, I do not find evidence that the manipulation activates a social norm of responsibility in managers. I also do not find support that the treatment effect is more pronounced in managers with high internalized responsibility. Robustness tests suggest a potential confounding factor among a subset of managers who were recruited from accounting courses, and who may have experienced an increased sense of accountability and reputational concerns when participating in sessions with other students from the same course.