From Individual Choices to the 4-Eyes-Principle: The Big Robber Game revisited among Financial Professionals and Students

Sebastian Bachler (), Armando Holzknecht (), Jürgen Huber and Michael Kirchler ()

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: While headline news frequently report cases of large-scale fraud, corruption, and other immoral behavior, laboratory experiments often show prosocial behavior in strategic games. To reconcile and explain these seemingly conflicting observations, Alós-Ferrer et al. (2022) introduced the Big Robber Game — an altered dictator game where one robber can take money from multiple victims. They reported low prosocial behavior among a pool of student subjects who behaved more prosocial in bilateral games than in the Big Robber Game. In our study,we employ the Big Robber Game within a 2x2 factorial design, engaging over 860 participants to examine the behaviors of financial professionals versus students. Moreover, inspired by the four-eyes principle, a common practice in the finance industry, we investigate decision-making both individually and in pairs. We find overall support for the results of Alós-Ferrer et al. (2022) and that finance professionals rob less than students. Accounting for a multitude of specifications, socio-demographic characteristics and individual preferences, we report that treatment differences disappear, indicating similar behavior across individuals, pairs, finance professionals, and students. Finally, in a series of non-pre-registered exploratory analyses, we show that victims expect finance professionals to rob significantly more than student robbers, implying that finance professionals are considered to be less pro-social than students’ peers.

Keywords: Selfishness; Social Preferences; Finance Professionals; Group decisions; Experimental Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
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