Intermediation Reduces Punishment (and Reward)

Coffman, Lucas C.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1330669

Cited by 60 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It may be arguable whether the ability to commission unethical behavior while maintaining a positive self-image is really an additional rationale for principals to hire agents (Hamman et al 2010) or merely one of agency's behavioral e ects. Either way, the nding is backed by other experiments showing that third parties indeed hold principals less responsible for harm in icted through agents even if the principals have full foreknowledge of their agent's actions (Blount 1995, Bartling and Fischbacher 2008, Co man 2011. This literature clearly suggests that agents have a behavioral tendency to disregard interests other than their own and that of their principal.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

Fischer

Goerg

Hamann

2015

Review of Law &Amp; Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how e ective can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in several US states and in British Columbia, Canada. We ran a laboratory experiment with a framing likened to German corporate law which traditionally includes social standards. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome material incentives. However, even absent incentives the stakeholder norm does not foster otherregarding behavior but slightly inhibits it instead. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both incentives and framing e ects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate. JEL classi cation: A12, D01, D03, L21, M14, M52

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

Fischer

Goerg

Hamann

2015

Review of Law &Amp; Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If a person feels responsible for determining the outcome, the notion of responsibility says that they are more likely to exhibit pro-social (cooperative) behavior. This was first established using experimental data [4] and there are now several articles supporting this claim [3], [5], [6], [7]. In the particular case of the employer−employee relationship, effort is typically considered unobservable, so that the worker has some latitude concerning the level of effort contributed, and thus bears some degree of responsibility for the outcome.…”

Section: Discussion Of Pros and Consmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some recent experimental work demonstrates this principle by showing how punishment changes when a person making an unfair choice delegates the final choice to another party [6]. One party is identified as a dictator, a second party is a potential agent, a third party is the recipient, and the fourth party can punish.…”

Section: Exploiting Delegation Rights For Personal Gainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should firms allow workers to choose their own wage?

Charness¹

2015

izawol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.

show abstract

“…They find that responsibility attribution is effectively shifted, which constitutes a motive for the delegation of the decision right. Coffman (2011) finds evidence that people blame someone less when that person utilizes an intermediary, even when they believe that choosing an intermediary is a deliberate attempt to avoid punishment. Hamman, Loewenstein and Weber (2009) provide the results from experiments in which principals either decide how much money to share with a recipient or hire other agents to make decisions on their behalf.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social comparisons in wage delegation: experimental evidence

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We make two contributions in this article. First, we examine whether social comparisons have behavioral effects on workers' performance when a firm can choose workers' wages or let them choose their own. Firms can delegate the wage decision to neither, one or both workers in the firm. We vary the information workers receive, finding that social comparisons concerning both wages and decision rights affect workers' performance. In fact, the relative effect of discrimination in relation to decision rights is larger than in relation to wage. Our second contribution is methodological. We find that our treatment effects are present with both stated effort and a real-effort task, suggesting that both approaches may yield similar results in labor experiments.

show abstract

Intermediation Reduces Punishment (and Reward)

Cited by 60 publications

References 59 publications

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

Should firms allow workers to choose their own wage?

Social comparisons in wage delegation: experimental evidence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About