Responsibility effects in decision making under risk

We explore situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else’s outcomes as well as for her own. We study such choices for gains and losses, and for different gain probabilities. For 50–50 lotteries over gains we find that being responsible for somebody else’s payoffs increases risk aversion. In the loss domain, on the other hand, we find significantly different behavior relative to gains, with slightly more risk seeking under responsibility. In a second experiment, we replicate the finding of increased risk aversion for large probabilities of a gain, while for small probability gains we find increased risk seeking under conditions of responsibility relative to large probabilities. This discredits hypotheses of a ‘cautious shift’ under responsibility, and may indicate an accentuation of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes usually found for individual choices. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015