Why Blame?

Mehmet Gurdal, Joshua B. Miller and Aldo Rustichini

No 270437, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others based on events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third party. We observe widespread blame: regardless of their choice, agents are blamed by principals for the outcome of the lottery, an event they are not responsible for. We provide an explanation of this apparently irrational behavior with a delegated-expertise principal-agent model, the subjects’ salient perturbation of the environment.

Keywords: Financial; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2013-08-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270437/files/twerp_1022_rust.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270437/files/t ... t.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Blame? (2013)
Working Paper: Why Blame? (2013)
Working Paper: Why Blame? (2013)
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:ags:uwarer:270437

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.270437

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().