Project Details

Humans make decisions jointly with others. They share responsibility for the outcome with their interaction partners. Today, more and more often the partner in a decision is not another human but, instead, a machine. Here we ask whether the type of the partner, machine or human, affects our responsibility, our perception of the choice and the choice itself. As a workhorse, we use a modified dictator game with two joint decision makers: either two humans or one human and one machine. We find a no treatment effect on perceived responsibility or guilt. We also find only a small and insignificant effect on actual choices.

"For the future, an open discussion of hybrid-decision situations would be desirable. It might not only be important to address the technical question of what we can achieve by using artificial decision-making systems such as computer but also how humans perceive them in different situations and how this influences human decision-making."

Published as: Kirchkamp, O., Strobel, C. (2019). Sharing Responsibility with a Machine. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. 80, 25-33.

Presented at: Annual Meeting Verein für Socialpolitik 2017, Annual Congress of the European Economic Association 2017, 2nd Coller Conference on Behavioral Economics 2017, Prague Conference on Behavioral Sciences 2017