Shifting the Blame: On Delegation and Responsibility

By Bj�rn Bartling, Urs Fischbacher. 2008

398 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a5ca68cb7df220e640866e6d12870dcf0361c42

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Gary Charness
2. George Loewenstein
3. Ernst Fehr
4. Christoph Engel
5. Peter Kuhn
6. John H. Kagel
7. Zachary Grossman
8. Roberto A. Weber

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Peter Kuhn
2. Ernst Fehr
3. Gary Charness
4. David J. Cooper
5. John H. Kagel
6. George Loewenstein
7. Roberto A. Weber
8. Holger Herz

In Safety Research

1. Ernst Fehr
2. Gary Charness
3. David J. Cooper
4. Peter Kuhn
5. John H. Kagel
6. George Loewenstein
7. Björn Bartling
8. Matthias Sutter

Citations in the corpus

• The Intrinsic Value of Decision Rights (2014, background): “For example, if decision rights involve the choice between fair and unfair outcomes, some people might prefer not making these decisions (Bartling and Fischbacher 2012).”
• Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect (2014, neutral): “Similarly, selling the fund becomes a concrete action taken to punish the manager for the poor performance, consistent with the evidence on scapegoating and responsibility attribution (Bartling and Fischbacher (2012)).”
• Other Regarding Preferences: A Selective Survey of Experimental Results (2012, background): “Bartling and Fischbacher (2012) note that companies in this situation often hire an outside agent to act as CRO (chief restructuring officer).”
• Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving (2015, neutral): “(24)In fact, Bartling et al. (2014) show that dictators get punished less for selfish decisions if they made their decision after purposely avoiding information on whether or not their action is selfish, as opposed to knowing their action is selfish.”
• Anticipatory and reactive forms of blame avoidance: of foxes and lions (2016, neutral): “Anticipatory blame avoidance efforts widen the room for maneuver of the blamed actor by limiting the blame attributed to the actor and provide additional possibilities to displace or diffuse blame by increasing the number of available scapegoats (Bartling and Fischbacher, 2012).”
• Human Decision Making with Machine Assistance (2019, background): “Finally, the properties of the task affect advice taking through the risk [42, 71] and responsibility [7, 8, 21, 44, 71] associated with the decision making process and outcomes.”
• Passing the buck: Delegating choices to others to avoid responsibility and blame (2016, background): “When a decision maker chooses for someone else in a scenario with only positive anticipated outcomes, the individual may not mind having or may even prefer to maintain decision control, as they could potentially reap any rewards associated with making a good decision (Bartling & Fischbacher, 2012).”
• Lab Labor: What can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab? (2010, background): “Falk and 34 See also Bartling and Fischbacher (2008) and Coffman (2009).”
• The Control Premium: A Preference for Payoff Autonomy † (2014, result): “In contrast to recent studies showing how the use of intermediation to shift blame for a harmful decision can reinforce the agency relationship (Bartling and Fischbacher 2011, Coffman 2011, Grossman and Oexl 2011, Hamman et al. 2010), we highlight a factor that undermines it.”
• Self-Interest through Delegation: An Additional Rationale for the Principal-Agent Relationship (2010, background): “Subjects randomly drew cards containing a letter (A, B, or C), which assigned them to their role, and a number that served to identify the subject for the experiment.”