The Influence of the Decision-maker Selection Process in Decision-making for Others

: Methodology, Elections, and Reluctance to Lead

Abstract

This thesis examines three issues around the impact of the decision-makers’ selection process on the decisions they make for others: the use of experimental currency units in investment experiments, the impact of elections and the impact of reluctance to lead on political decisions.
Chapter 1 introduces the experiments by covering existing literature as well as experimental methodology, and provides the outline of the following chapters.
Chapter 2 assesses the impact of experimental currency units in investment experiments on the decisions of participants. Our experiment varies the exchange rate between real currency and experimental currencies in three investment-related tasks. Though participants perceive a difference in risk between the treatments, we find that they do not change their investment decisions.
Chapter 3 examines the differences in political decisions between elected and randomly assigned decision-makers. We vary the decision-makers’ selection process and we measure the difference between decisions for self and decision-makers’ choices to determine their level of paternalism. Our findings suggest that participants are not more or less paternalistic when they are elected than when they are randomly selected. We also find that elections do not cause a selection bias towards more pro-social candidates and that making a decision for others before or after the decision-maker selection process does not impact the nature of the decision.
Chapter 4 analyses the difference in social preference between people who are willing and those who are reluctant to lead. We assess participants’ level of altruism, their willingness to lead, and ask them to make a money allocation decision for other participants. Our results suggest that there is no link between reluctance to lead and more altruistic decisions.
Chapter 5 provides a summary of the previous chapters and links our findings to existing research.

Date of Award	24 Apr 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Wolfgang Luhan (Supervisor), Federica Alberti (Supervisor) & Georgia Buckle (Supervisor)