Whistleblowing and diffusion of responsibility: An experiment

Lawrence Choo, Veronika Grimm, Gergely Horvath and Kohei Nitta

European Economic Review, 2019, vol. 119, issue C, 287-301

Abstract: In this paper we examine diffusion of responsibility in a whistleblowing experiment. We use a multi-player asymmetric information ultimatum game where only the proposer and a subset of the responders (the information insiders) know the size of a pot that the proposer distributes among information insiders and outsiders. Insiders have a clear monetary incentive to whistleblow in case of a small pot in order to avoid rejection of seemingly unfair offers by outsiders; in case of a large pot only altruistic motives could explain that insiders whistleblow. We vary the number of information insiders, one or two, who can whistleblow. We find that in all treatments close to 60% of the insiders whistleblow when they are pivotal for both small and large pots. In a treatment where other insider can also blow the whistle, we observe a significant drop in case only altruistic motives can explain whistleblowing. We show that the effect is due to the extensive margin, i.e. the share of whistleblowers drops to 20%, while patterns of active whistleblowers do not change. In case of low pot sizes, where whistleblowing is in line with selfish motives, we do not observe diffusion of responsibility, in spite of a possible free riding incentive due to a positive cost of whistleblowing.

Keywords: Whistleblowing; Diffusion of responsibility; Pro-social behaviours (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C92 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292119301291
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:eecrev:v:119:y:2019:i:c:p:287-301

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.07.010

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().