Sharing responsibility for the good

Matthias Greiff and Hannes Rusch

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2022, vol. 101, issue C

Abstract: Relative to individual decision-making, decision-makers in markets have been argued to be more willing to accept negative externalities of their actions. A key mechanism potentially explaining this phenomenon is a diffusion of responsibility between actors in markets. In the preregistered experiment reported here, we test for an effect of responsibility diffusion in a new context: economic transactions with positive externalities. In particular, we test if participants’ willingness to pay for the vaccination of a child against measles differs between individual and bilateral decision-making. We find no such effect. Our study thus adds an(other) instructive null-result to the literature trying to pin down precisely which aspects of market interactions affect precisely which types of morally relevant decisions.

Keywords: Markets; Morals; Responsibility; Externality; Vaccination; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:101:y:2022:i:c:s2214804322001240

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2022.101953

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