International and Interdisciplinary Seminars (IIS)

Prof. Raymond Duch CESS - Nuffield College, Oxford
"Attributing responsibility to collective decision makers"

Leaflet

Abstract

We argue that individuals use responsibility attribution heuristics that apply to collective decisions made, for example, by families, teams within firms, boards in international organizations, or coalition governments. We conduct laboratory and online experiments to tease out the heuristics subjects use in their responsibility attribution for collective decision makers.
The lab experiments comprise a collective dictator game in which decision makers have weighted votes and recipients can punish individual decisionmakers. Our results show that recipients punish unfair allocations andmainly target the decision maker with proposal power and with the largest vote share. We find weak evidence that decision makers with veto power are targeted or that recipients punish proportional to vote share. The online experiment demonstrates that subjects indeed believe that the decision maker with proposal power has the most influence on the collective decision outcome. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of vote choice.

Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers - paper



In collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Social Action (University of Milan)

11th November 2014 h 16.30

GSSPS Room A

via Pace 10