I Choose For You: an Experimental Study

2026-01-20

AI Summary

This study investigates whether individuals’ risk and time preferences differ when making decisions for others compared to deciding for themselves. To address this, the authors introduce a novel “stakeholder” experimental paradigm in which proxy decision-making incurs direct personal costs, thereby uncovering behavioral distinctions between selfish and non-selfish types that conventional costless designs fail to detect. Integrating behavioral experiments, preference elicitation, heterogeneity analysis, and out-of-sample predictive modeling, the research demonstrates that most individuals exhibit greater risk aversion and impatience when deciding on behalf of others. Moreover, the proposed framework substantially enhances behavioral consistency and yields significantly stronger out-of-sample predictive performance compared to traditional approaches.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Behavioral Game Theory
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

We investigate whether risk and time preferences differ when individuals make decisions for others compared to making decisions for themselves. We introduce a novel ``skin in the game''experimental design, where choices for others incur a direct cost to the decision-maker, ensuring a genuine trade-off between self-interest and surrogate allocation. The modal outcome is that participants are more risk-averse and impatient when choosing for others than for themselves. Our methodology reveals significant heterogeneity, successfully identifying selfish types often missed by the more standard ``no skin in the game''approaches. The message is nuanced, as even non-selfish participants behave differently when they have skin in the game. Furthermore, our framework yields more consistent behavior and superior out-of-sample predictive power.

Problem

• risk preferences
• time preferences
• decision-making for others
• skin in the game
• experimental study

Innovation

• skin in the game
• experimental design
• risk preferences
• time preferences
• decision-making for others