Don't patronize me! An Experiment on Preferences for Authorship

Silvia Lübbecke and Wendelin Schnedler

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Do people only reject interference and keep control in order to affect the outcome? We find that 20% of subjects reject unrequired help and insist on their solution to a problem-although doing so is costly and does not change the result. We tease out the motives by varying the information available to the interfering party (paternalist). Subjects do not resist to show to the paternalist that they were able to find the correct solution. Instead, two motives seem to play a role. First, subjects prefer to have produced or `authored' the solution themselves. Second, subjects desire to signal their authorship and hence their independence to the paternalist.

Keywords: self-esteem; image concerns; autonomy; competence; paternalism; self-determination; preference for authorship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D82 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/208385/1/luebbecke-schnedler2019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Don't patronize me! An experiment on preferences for authorship (2020)
Working Paper: Don't Patronize Me! An Experiment on Preferences for Authorship (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:208385

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().