An Experimental Study on Responsibility Attribution in Sequential Decision-Making

Abstract

Many decisions in organizations, politics, and economics are made collectively by groups. Often, other people who are not part of the decision-making process are affected by the resulting outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand how individual group members are held accountable for the collective decision. In a recent paper, Bartling et al. (2015) analyzed the attribution of responsibility for collective decisions in a sequential voting game, in which three decision makers sequentially decide on an equal or unequal allocation implemented for themselves and three other recipients. They found that the pivotal decision maker was punished significantly more than non-pivotal decision makers. However, it remains unclear what other factors influence the attribution of responsibility for collective decisions. Therefore, this study extends the work of Bartling et al. (2015) in two ways: first, the decision right is assigned through one of two different (legitimate) mechanisms, and second, one allocation is already preselected as the default. The assignment of individual responsibility is measured by eliciting the punishment choices of the recipients. Interestingly, the legitimacy of the group-building mechanism has no significant effect on the assigned responsibility. However, choosing the default is associated with less punishment, as long as other punishment motives are not controlled for. Additionally, the main result of Bartling et al. (2015), that the pivotal decision maker is punished significantly more, could not be replicated. Instead, the unkindness of a decision determines the punishment behavior of recipients.