The Intrinsic Value of Decision Rights

By Björn Bartling, Ernst Fehr, Holger Herz. Social Science Research Network, 2014

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long argued that certain decision rights carry not only instrumental value but may also be valuable for their own sake. The ideas of autonomy, freedom, and liberty derive their intuitive appeal – at least partly – from an assumed positive intrinsic value of decision rights. Proving the existence of this value and measuring its size, however, is intricate. Here, we develop an experimental method capable of achieving these goals. The data reveal that – across different parameterizations – the large majority of our subjects intrinsically value decision rights beyond their instrumental benefit. The existence of an intrinsic value of decision rights helps understand the allocation of decision rights in practice, and it has implications for their optimal allocation in organizations, economic institutions, and society at large.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/005691ae362562bdb15ca86f5b6c6631dfd2ef33

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Citations in the corpus

Human Decision Making with Machine Assistance (2019, background): “The two panels of Figure 6 show that the incentive to avoid false positive or false negative choices does not induce participants to rely more on machine advice, counter to our Hypotheses 10 b and 10 c.”
Can nudges be transparent and yet effective (2018, unknown): “Another recent research stream provides evidence of the intrinsic value of decision rights and autonomy (Fehr et al., 2013; Bartling et al., 2014; Owens et al., 2014).”