IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/expeco/v25y2022i2d10.1007_s10683-021-09731-w.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

By chance or by choice? Biased attribution of others’ outcomes when social preferences matter

Author

Listed:
  • Nisvan Erkal

    (University of Melbourne)

  • Lata Gangadharan

    (Monash University)

  • Boon Han Koh

    (University of East Anglia)

Abstract

Decision makers in positions of power often make unobserved choices under risk and uncertainty. In many cases, they face a trade-off between maximizing their own payoff and those of other individuals. What inferences are made in such instances about their choices when only outcomes are observable? We conduct two experiments that investigate whether outcomes are attributed to luck or choices. Decision makers choose between two investment options, where the more costly option has a higher chance of delivering a good outcome (that is, a higher payoff) for the group. We show that attribution biases exist in the evaluation of good outcomes. On average, good outcomes of decision makers are attributed more to luck as compared to bad outcomes. This asymmetry implies that decision makers get too little credit for their successes. The biases are exhibited by those individuals who make or would make the less prosocial choice for the group as decision makers, suggesting that a consensus effect may be shaping both the belief formation and updating processes.

Suggested Citation

  • Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan & Boon Han Koh, 2022. "By chance or by choice? Biased attribution of others’ outcomes when social preferences matter," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(2), pages 413-443, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:expeco:v:25:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10683-021-09731-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s10683-021-09731-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10683-021-09731-w
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10683-021-09731-w?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jordi Brandts & Gary Charness, 2011. "The strategy versus the direct-response method: a first survey of experimental comparisons," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 14(3), pages 375-398, September.
    2. Uri Gneezy & Jan Potters, 1997. "An Experiment on Risk Taking and Evaluation Periods," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(2), pages 631-645.
    3. Ruben Durante & Louis Putterman & Joël Weele, 2014. "Preferences For Redistribution And Perception Of Fairness: An Experimental Study," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 1059-1086, August.
    4. Ben Greiner, 2015. "Subject pool recruitment procedures: organizing experiments with ORSEE," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 1(1), pages 114-125, July.
    5. Alexander W. Cappelen & James Konow & Erik ?. S?rensen & Bertil Tungodden, 2013. "Just Luck: An Experimental Study of Risk-Taking and Fairness," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(4), pages 1398-1413, June.
    6. Kai Barron, 2021. "Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(1), pages 31-58, March.
    7. Alberto Alesina & George-Marios Angeletos, 2005. "Fairness and Redistribution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 960-980, September.
    8. Cole, Shawn & Healy, Andrew & Werker, Eric, 2012. "Do voters demand responsive governments? Evidence from Indian disaster relief," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(2), pages 167-181.
    9. Grossman, Zachary & Owens, David, 2012. "An unlucky feeling: Overconfidence and noisy feedback," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 510-524.
    10. Ingvild Almås & Alexander W. Cappelen & Bertil Tungodden, 2020. "Cutthroat Capitalism versus Cuddly Socialism: Are Americans More Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking than Scandinavians?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 128(5), pages 1753-1788.
    11. Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole, 2010. "Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 77(305), pages 1-19, January.
    12. Alexander W. Cappelen & Astri Drange Hole & Erik Ø Sørensen & Bertil Tungodden, 2007. "The Pluralism of Fairness Ideals: An Experimental Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 818-827, June.
    13. Alexander Coutts, 2019. "Good news and bad news are still news: experimental evidence on belief updating," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(2), pages 369-395, June.
    14. Alberto Alesina & Stefanie Stantcheva & Edoardo Teso, 2018. "Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(2), pages 521-554, February.
    15. Tanjim Hossain & Ryo Okui, 2013. "The Binarized Scoring Rule," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 80(3), pages 984-1001.
    16. Rafael Di Tella & Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Andres Babino & Mariano Sigman, 2015. "Conveniently Upset: Avoiding Altruism by Distorting Beliefs about Others' Altruism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(11), pages 3416-3442, November.
    17. Deffains, Bruno & Espinosa, Romain & Thöni, Christian, 2016. "Political self-serving bias and redistribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 67-74.
    18. Ertac, Seda & Gurdal, Mehmet Y., 2012. "Deciding to decide: Gender, leadership and risk-taking in groups," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 24-30.
    19. Galeotti, Fabio & Zizzo, Daniel John, 2018. "Identifying voter preferences: The trade-off between honesty and competence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 27-50.
    20. David M. Grether, 1980. "Bayes Rule as a Descriptive Model: The Representativeness Heuristic," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 95(3), pages 537-557.
    21. Price, Paul C., 1998. "Effects of a Relative-Frequency Elicitation Question on Likelihood Judgment Accuracy: The Case of External Correspondence, , , , ," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 277-297, December.
    22. Thomas Buser & Leonie Gerhards & Joël Weele, 2018. "Responsiveness to feedback as a personal trait," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 56(2), pages 165-192, April.
    23. J. Michelle Brock & Andreas Lange & Erkut Y. Ozbay, 2013. "Dictating the Risk: Experimental Evidence on Giving in Risky Environments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(1), pages 415-437, February.
    24. Brownback, Andy & Kuhn, Michael A., 2019. "Understanding outcome bias," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 342-360.
    25. Dirk Engelmann & Martin Strobel, 2000. "The False Consensus Effect Disappears if Representative Information and Monetary Incentives Are Given," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 3(3), pages 241-260, December.
    26. Chen, Daniel L. & Schonger, Martin & Wickens, Chris, 2016. "oTree—An open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field experiments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(C), pages 88-97.
    27. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    28. Romain Gauriot & Lionel Page, 2019. "Fooled by Performance Randomness: Overrewarding Luck," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 101(4), pages 658-666, October.
    29. Pedro Rey-Biel & Roman Sheremeta & Neslihan Uler, 2018. "When Income Depends on Performance and Luck: The Effects of Culture and Information on Giving," Research in Experimental Economics, in: Experimental Economics and Culture, volume 20, pages 167-203, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    30. Kareem Haggag & Devin G Pope & Kinsey B Bryant-Lees & Maarten W Bos, 2019. "Attribution Bias in Consumer Choice," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(5), pages 2136-2183.
    31. Thomas R. Palfrey & Stephanie W. Wang, 2012. "Speculative Overpricing in Asset Markets With Information Flows," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 80(5), pages 1937-1976, September.
    32. Ambuehl, Sandro & Li, Shengwu, 2018. "Belief updating and the demand for information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 21-39.
    33. Karl Schlag & James Tremewan & Joël Weele, 2015. "A penny for your thoughts: a survey of methods for eliciting beliefs," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(3), pages 457-490, September.
    34. David Eil & Justin M. Rao, 2011. "The Good News-Bad News Effect: Asymmetric Processing of Objective Information about Yourself," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(2), pages 114-138, May.
    35. Leone, Andrew J. & Wu, Joanna Shuang & Zimmerman, Jerold L., 2006. "Asymmetric sensitivity of CEO cash compensation to stock returns," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(1-2), pages 167-192, October.
    36. Stephanie Wang, 2012. "Speculative Overpricing in Asset Markets with Information Flows," Working Paper 489, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jan 2012.
    37. Julio J. Rotemberg, 2014. "Models of Caring, or Acting as if One Cared, About the Welfare of Others," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 129-154, August.
    38. Ertac, Seda, 2011. "Does self-relevance affect information processing? Experimental evidence on the response to performance and non-performance feedback," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 80(3), pages 532-545.
    39. Christine L. Exley, 2015. "Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: The Role of Risk," Discussion Papers 15-013, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
    40. Engelmann, Dirk & Strobel, Martin, 2012. "Deconstruction and reconstruction of an anomaly," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 76(2), pages 678-689.
    41. Fong, Christina, 2001. "Social preferences, self-interest, and the demand for redistribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(2), pages 225-246, November.
    42. Erkal, Nisvan & Gangadharan, Lata & Koh, Boon Han, 2020. "Replication: Belief elicitation with quadratic and binarized scoring rules," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    43. Gary Charness & David I. Levine, 2007. "Intention and Stochastic Outcomes: An Experimental study," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(522), pages 1051-1072, July.
    44. Matthew Rabin & Joel L. Schrag, 1999. "First Impressions Matter: A Model of Confirmatory Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 37-82.
    45. Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2001. "Are CEOs Rewarded for Luck? The Ones Without Principals Are," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(3), pages 901-932.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Friedrichsen, Jana & Momsen, Katharina & Piasenti, Stefano, 2022. "Ignorance, intention and stochastic outcomes," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 100, pages 1-1.
    2. Friedrichsen, Jana & Momsen, Katharina & Piasenti, Stefano, 2022. "Ignorance, intention and stochastic outcomes☆," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    3. Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan & Boon Han Koh, 2023. "Discrimination in Evaluation Criteria: The Role of Beliefs versus Outcomes," Discussion Papers 2316, University of Exeter, Department of Economics.
    4. Erkal, Nisvan & Gangadharan, Lata & Koh, Boon Han, 2023. "Do women receive less blame than men? Attribution of outcomes in a prosocial setting," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 210(C), pages 441-452.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan & Boon Han Koh, 2018. "By chance or by choice? Biased attribution of others’ outcomes," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 2040, The University of Melbourne.
    2. Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan & Boon Han Koh, 2021. "Gender Biases in Performance Evaluation: The Role of Beliefs Versus Outcomes," University of East Anglia School of Economics Working Paper Series 2021-09, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    3. Kai Barron, 2021. "Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(1), pages 31-58, March.
    4. Vanessa Valero, 2022. "Redistribution and beliefs about the source of income inequality," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(3), pages 876-901, June.
    5. Erkal, Nisvan & Gangadharan, Lata & Koh, Boon Han, 2023. "Do women receive less blame than men? Attribution of outcomes in a prosocial setting," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 210(C), pages 441-452.
    6. Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan & Boon Han Koh, 2023. "Discrimination in Evaluation Criteria: The Role of Beliefs versus Outcomes," Discussion Papers 2316, University of Exeter, Department of Economics.
    7. Castagnetti, Alessandro & Schmacker, Renke, 2022. "Protecting the ego: Motivated information selection and updating," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 142(C).
    8. Daniel J. Benjamin, 2018. "Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases," NBER Working Papers 25200, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Alexander Coutts, 2019. "Good news and bad news are still news: experimental evidence on belief updating," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(2), pages 369-395, June.
    10. Markus M. Möbius & Muriel Niederle & Paul Niehaus & Tanya S. Rosenblat, 2022. "Managing Self-Confidence: Theory and Experimental Evidence," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(11), pages 7793-7817, November.
    11. Murad, Zahra & Starmer, Chris, 2021. "Confidence snowballing and relative performance feedback," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 190(C), pages 550-572.
    12. Banerjee, Ritwik & Gupta, Nabanita Datta & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2020. "Feedback spillovers across tasks, self-confidence and competitiveness," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 127-170.
    13. Brownback, Andy & Kuhn, Michael A., 2019. "Understanding outcome bias," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 342-360.
    14. Michele Bernasconi & Enrico Longo & Valeria Maggian, 2023. "When merit breeds luck (or not): an experimental study on distributive justice," Working Papers 2023:02, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    15. David Hope & Julian Limberg & Nina Weber, 2023. "Technological Change, Task Complexity, and Preferences for Redistribution," ifo Working Paper Series 398, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    16. Coutts, Alexander, 2019. "Testing models of belief bias: An experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 549-565.
    17. Thomas Buser & Leonie Gerhards & Joël Weele, 2018. "Responsiveness to feedback as a personal trait," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 56(2), pages 165-192, April.
    18. Cacault, Maria Paula & Grieder, Manuel, 2019. "How group identification distorts beliefs," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 63-76.
    19. Cavalan, Quentin & de Gardelle, Vincent & Vergnaud, Jean-Christophe, 2022. "I did most of the work! Three sources of bias in bargaining with joint production," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    20. Fetscher, Verena, 2020. "Equalizing Incomes in the Future : Why Structural Differences in Social Insurance Matter for Redistribution Preferences," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 463, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Decision-making under risk; Beliefs about others’ decisions; Attribution biases; Social preferences; Consensus effect; Experiments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:expeco:v:25:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10683-021-09731-w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.