Responding to (un)reasonable requests by an authority
- PDF / 402,874 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 177 Views
(0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)
Responding to (un)reasonable requests by an authority Vittorio Pelligra1,2
•
Tommaso Reggiani3,4,5
•
Daniel John Zizzo6
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We consider the notions of static and dynamic reasonableness of requests by an authority in a trust game experiment. The authority, modeled as the experimenter, systematically varies the experimental norm of what is expected from trustees to return to trustors, both in terms of the level of each request and in terms of the sequence of the requests. Static reasonableness matters in a self-biased way, in the sense that low requests justify returning less, but high requests tend to be ignored. Dynamic reasonableness also matters, in the sense that, if requests keep increasing, trustees return less compared to the same requests presented in random or decreasing order. Requests never systematically increase trustworthiness but may decrease it. Keywords Trust Trustworthiness Authority Reasonableness Moral wiggle room Oral licensing
JEL Classification C91 D01 D03 D63
1 Introduction It is commonly believed that compliance is ubiquitous in social life. People may respond to explicit and implicit requests by modifying their behavior according to what they are requested to do. Managers in organizations may find this particularly Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238020-09758-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Daniel John Zizzo [email protected] Vittorio Pelligra [email protected] Tommaso Reggiani [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
123
V. Pelligra et al.
helpful, and there is a variety of other contexts where it can also be useful, such as tax compliance and public good contribution (Cadsby et al. 2006; Silverman et al. 2014). An overlooked factor that may influence compliance is the reasonableness of the request received by an authority. When a manager explicitly or implicitly asks someone to do something, it is likely that her willingness to fulfill your request depends on how reasonable she perceives such a request. We try to operationalize the idea of reasonableness and to study its effect on compliance in the context of a fiduciary relationship. Our baseline is a simple trust game in which the trustor has to decide whether or not to send her entire monetary endowment and the trustee, in turn, has to decide what proportion, if any, to send back. We investigate whether and to what extent if someone in a position of authority, such as a manager and in our study the experimenter, asks the trustees to send back positive amounts, this leads to an increase of trustworthiness and trust, and whether this depends on the reasonableness of the request. The request is framed in the form of a message to the trustee saying that the experimenters expect him or her to send a specific share of what she recei
Data Loading...
