Incapacitated Patients' Wellbeing: Surrogate Decision Making

Patients' wellbeing often depends on making the right decision with regards to their healthcare treatment and other decisions relating to their health care or finances in terms of their end of life. If they are unable to make decisions for themselves, other people have to make those decisions on their behalf. This important task is described in literature as surrogate decision making. We survey and illustrate several important issues that are associated with surrogate decision making and provide an overview of the factors that have been found to affect its accuracy. Selection of a surrogate decision maker has been found to be affected by the beneficiary’s nationality, risk attitudes, and personality and by specific qualities of the surrogate. Decision accuracy (as indexed by matching between choices for self or relative) has been found to be affected by factors such as nationality, surrogate qualities, surrogate person choice, risk attitudes and personality

Improving one’s choices by putting oneself in others’ shoes – an experimental analysis

This paper investigates how letting people predict others’ choices under risk affects subsequent own choices. We find an improvement of strong rationality (risk neutrality) for losses in own choices, but no such improvement for gains. There is no improvement of weak rationality (avoiding preference reversals). Overall, risk aversion in own choices increases. Conversely, for the effects of own choices on predicting for others, the risk aversion predicted in others’ choices is reduced if preceded by own choices, for both gains and losses. Remarkably, we find a new probability matching paradox at the group level. Relative to preceding studies on the effects of predicting others’ choices, we added real incentives, pure framing effects, and simplicity of stimuli. Our stimuli were maximally targeted towards our research questions

Improving one’s choices by putting oneself in others’ shoes – An experimental analysis

This paper investigates how letting people predict others’ choices under risk affects subsequent own choices. We find an improvement of strong rationality (risk neutrality) for losses in own choices, but no such improvement for gains. There is no improvement of weak rationality (avoiding preference reversals). Overall, risk aversion in own choices increases. Conversely, for the effects of own choices on predicting for others, the risk aversion predicted in others’ choices is reduced if preceded by own choices, for both gains and losses. Remarkably, we find a new probability matching paradox at the group level. Relative to preceding studies on the effects of predicting others’ choices, we added real incentives, pure framing effects, and simplicity of stimuli. Our stimuli were maximally targeted towards our research questions

A Moral Contractual Approach to Labor Law Reform: A Template for Using Ethical Principles to Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed to do so Effectively

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties\u27 reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means of self-regulation derived from contract are more likely to be effective when parties have ongoing relationships like those between management and labor organizations. The paper explains how the current law and proposed amendments fail because they focus on fairness as a function of union win rates, and then outlines a plan to leverage strong moral contractual obligations and related norms of behavior to create as fair a process as possible for employees to vote unions up or down

Safety First? The Role of Emotion in Safety Product Betrayal Aversion

Consumers often face decisions about whether to purchase products that are intended to protect them from possible harm. However, safety products rarely provide perfect protection and sometimes betray consumers by causing the very harm they are intended to prevent. Examples include vaccines that may cause disease and air bags that may explode with such force that they cause death. Expanding research on betrayal aversion, this study examines the role of emotions in consumers\u27 tendency to choose safety options that provide less overall protection in order to eliminate a very small probability of harm due to safety product betrayal. In five studies we find that betrayal aversion is reduced and safer alternatives are selected when factors that dampen the emotional response to potential betrayals are introduced or taken into account. These factors include changing the betrayal from an action to an omission (study 1), introducing positive imagery (study 2), introducing visual representations of risk (study 3), making the decision for another rather than oneself (study 4), and intuitive thinking style (study 5)

Do we become more cautious for others when large amounts of money are at stake?

A considerable proportion of financial decisions are made by agents acting on behalf of other people. Although people are more cautious for others when making medical decisions, this does not seem to be the case for economic decisions. However, studies with large amounts of money are particularly absent from the literature, which precludes a clear comparison to studies in the medical domain. To address this gap, we investigated the effect of outcome magnitude in two experiments where participants made choices between safe and risky options. Decision-makers were not more cautious for others over large amounts. In fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain. We did not find self-other differences in the loss domain for either outcome magnitude. This suggests that the caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts, or at least not in the same way. These results echo the concerns that have been raised about excessive risk-taking by financial agents

Why Can't We Accurately Predict Others' Decisions? Prediction Discrepancy in Risky Decision-Making

Individuals often fail to accurately predict others' decisions in a risky environment. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics and causes of this prediction discrepancy. Participants completed a risky decision-making task mixed with different domains (gain vs. loss) and probabilities (small vs. large), with some participants making decisions for themselves (the actor) and the others predicting the actors' decisions (the predictor). The results demonstrated a prediction discrepancy: predictions were more risk-averse than the actual decisions over small-probability gains and more risk-seeking over large-probability gains, while these patterns were reversed in the loss domain. Reported and predicted levels of emotional stimulation revealed a pattern that is consistent with the notion of risk-as-feelings and empathy gaps. Mediation analysis provided strong evidence that such prediction discrepancy is driven mainly by the predictor's underestimate of the intensity (not the impact) of the actor's emotional state

False Consensus and the Role of Ambiguity in Predictions of Others’ Risk Preferences

Already in the 1930ies psychologists mentioned the tendency of people to see the self as the center of social judgment. This leads to egocentrically biased judgments when assessing others’ behavior. Since the first demonstration of this social projection bias in a study by Ross, Greene, and House (1977) a lot of studies followed. They show the effect in different contexts and the false consensus effect became a widely accepted phenomenon. In this paper we analyze the false consensus effect in a financial context. In two studies, we use simple lottery questions and ask subjects to state certainty equivalents for the own person and also to predict the average certainty equivalent of other participants. We find a strong correlation between the own judgment and the prediction of others’ judgments. As we use 50/50-lotteries and in addition ambiguous probabilities in our studies, we extend the scope of Gilovich (1990) to financial decisions. The false consensus effect is stronger in situations with ambiguity. We also asked participants to give an interval for the certainty equivalents, i.e. a lower bound that they think is not fallen short by more than 5 % of the participants and also an upper bound which is not exceeded by more than 5 %. We find that people strongly underestimate the variation in others’ risk preferences

Aging and Attitudes Towards Strategic Uncertainty and Competition: An Artefactual Field Experiment in a Swiss Bank

We study the attitudes of junior and senior employees towards strategic uncertainty and competition, by means of a market entry game inspired by Camerer and Lovallo (1999). Seniors exhibit higher entry rates compared to juniors, especially when earnings depend on relative performance. This difference persists after controlling for attitudes towards non-strategic uncertainty and for beliefs on others' competitiveness and ability. Social image matters, as evidenced by the fact that seniors enter more when they predict others enter more and when they are matched with a majority of juniors. This contradicts the stereotype of risk averse and less competitive older employees

The premium as informational cue in insurance decision-making

Often in insurance decision making, there are risk factors on which the insurer has an informational advantage over the consumer. But when the insurer sets and posts a premium for the consumer to consider, the consumer can potentially use the premium as an informational cue for the loss probability, and thereby to reduce the insurer’s informational advantage. We study, by means of a behavioral model, how consumers would use the premium as an informational cue in such contexts. The belief formation process in our model assumes that both prior knowledge and the premium (as a proportion of the compensation) might have an impact on the consumer’s estimate of the loss probability. Moreover, the premium impacts the estimate through an anchoring-and-adjustment process. The model potentially leads to violations of rational expectations, with which the consumer overestimates the loss probability beyond what could be inferred from the premium, given the premise that the insurer must seek to break even or earn an expected profit. Our model analysis moreover implies that the frequency of such violations is non-increasing as the premium increases. Lastly, the model implies a generally inverted-U relationship between insurance demand and the premium, so that the demand is upward sloping at low premium levels and downward sloping at high premium levels. A pilot field study and a laboratory experiment provide robust evidence for our model implications and calibrations for its parameters