Responsibility Effects in Decision Making under Risk
b"We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for\\nsomebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain\\nwe confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion.\\nThis is however not attributable to a 'cautious shift' as often thought. Indeed, looking at risk\\nattitudes in the loss domain, we find an increase in risk seeking under responsibility. This raises\\nissues about the nature of various decision biases under risk, and to what extent changed behavior\\nunder responsibility may depend on a social norm of caution in situations of responsibility versus\\nnaive corrections from perceived biases. To further explore this issue, we designed a second\\nexperiment to explore risk-taking behavior for gain prospects offering very small or very large\\nprobabilities of winning. For large probabilities, we find increased risk aversion, thus confirming\\nour earlier finding. For small probabilities however, we find an increase of risk seeking under\\nconditions of responsibility. The latter finding thus discredits hypotheses of a social rule dictating\\ncaution under responsibility, and can be explained through flexible self-correction models\\npredicting an accentuation of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes predicted by prospect theory. An\\nadditional accountability mechanism does not change risk behavior, except for mixed prospects, in\\nwhich it reduces loss aversion. This indicates that loss aversion is of a fundamentally different\\nnature than probability weighting or utility curvature. Implications for debiasing are discussed."