Don't patronize me! An experiment on preferences for authorship

• Date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Wendelin Schnedler,Silvia Lübbecke
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12347

J Econ Manage Strat. 2020;29:420–438.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jems420

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Received: 26 November 2018

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Revised: 7 December 2019

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Accepted: 3 January 2020

DOI: 10.1111/jems.12347

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Don't patronize me! An experiment on preferences for

authorship

Silvia Lübbecke

1

|Wendelin Schnedler

1,2,3

1

Management Department, Faculty of

Economics and Business Administration,

University of Paderborn, Paderborn,

Germany

2

Centre for Market and Public

Organization, University of Bristol,

Bristol, UK

3

IZA, Bonn, Germany

Correspondence

Wendelin Schnedler, Management

Department, Faculty of Economics and

Business Administration, University of

Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100,

D‐33098 Paderborn, Germany.

Email: wendelin.schnedler@upb.de

Abstract

Do people only reject interference and keep control to affect the outcome? We

find that 20% of subjects reject unrequired help and insist on their solution to a

problem—although doing so is costly and does not change the result. We tease

out the motives by varying the information available to the interfering party

(paternalist). Subjects do not resist to show to the paternalist that they were

able to find the correct solution. Instead, two motives seem to play a role. First,

subjects prefer to have produced or “authored”the solution themselves. Sec-

ond, subjects desire to signal their authorship and hence their independence to

the paternalist.

Résiste

Prouve que tu existes

Michel Berger

1|INTRODUCTION

The slogan “take back control”allegedly inspired many Britons to vote for leaving the European Union (EU) in the 2016

referendum although they are likely to suffer economically from the departure.

1

The most important reason given in an exit

poll was not the desire to change a specific policy but “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.”

2

This suggests that the leave‐vote was not necessarily about what gets decided but who decides or “authors”a certain outcome.

If humans have such a preference for authorship, this has important ramifications. In particular, a decision maker

who well‐meaningly provides people with an outcome that is beneficial to them cannot be sure that this outcome will

be accepted. It might even spark resistance. To avoid this, organizational designers would have to think about how to

involve the people such that they “feel included.”Indeed, scholars from other fields, for example, management (Pierce,

Kostova, & Dirks, 2001), organizational behavior (Avey, Avolio, Crossley, & Luthans, 2009), or community planning

(Lachapelle, 2008) claim that such “psychological ownership”is important.

Whether humans indeed care about “authorship”is hard to detect with observational data. The refusal of a good

outcome just because it is decided by someone else may be perceived as childish. Hence, economic agents (managers,

employees, etc.) have an incentive to mask this refusal by pretending that there are substantial differences between the

resisted outcome and what they want. Moreover, by resisting, agents typically retain control over the outcome. In other

words, resistance may be driven by a preference to influence the outcome in a direction favored by the agent. In practice, it is

thus very hard if not impossible to distinguish whether some behavior is driven by the desire for authorship or to affect the

outcome. However, only in the latter case, we can be certain that providing a beneficial outcome will spark no resistance.

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC

This paper provides, to our knowledge for the first time, clean evidence that individuals have a preference for

authorship. They resist an outcome although this does not allow them to actually change it. We find that about a fifth of

subjects who successfully solved a logical puzzle insist on their solution and reject the very same solution if offered by

some paternalist although doing so entails material losses. This resistance is not accidental. The rate at which it occurs

is significantly different from the rate at which subjects commit an equally costly error. Resisting agents are on average

willing to pay the non‐negligible sum of 2.10€for “their”solution, which amounts to about 26% of the bonus earned by

correctly solving the puzzle.

There are different reasons why the agent may resist interference. First, the agent may want to inform the pa-

ternalist that she was capable of solving the problem herself and the key to deal with resistance is to recognize her

competence. Second, she may genuinely prefer to have authored the solution herself, for example, because this allows

her to see herself as someone determining her own fate (Deci, 1971; Deci & Ryan, 1985), or more formally, to signal a

positive image to her future self (Bodner & Prelec, 2003). In this case, resistance can be overcome by recognizing the

agent's input. Finally, the agent may want to signal that she does not like to be “messed”with and respecting this could

be a solution. In summary, the remedy that an organization should use depends on the motive for resistance.

The different motives are separated out in our experiment by systematically varying the information available to the

paternalist. In our first treatment, the R treatment, the paternalist only learns whether the agent resisted interference or

not—R stands for resistance. In this treatment, resistance might be used for any of the three motives put forward and

about a quarter of the subjects resist. In our RC treatment, we inform the paternalist not only about whether the agent

resisted interference but also whether her solution was correct. Being informed about the correctness removes the

agent's need to signal competence. The share of resistance remains around 25%, which indicates that signaling com-

petence to the paternalist is not the motive for resistance in our data. Finally, in the C treatment, the paternalist only

learns whether the puzzle was solved correctly but not whether the agent rejected help. (The design ensures that the

paternalist cannot deduce this from his payoff either.) The resistance rate drops by about 12 percentage points. This

drop is significant, which suggests that resistance is used by some subjects to signal their desire to be the author of

the solution. The resistance rate in the C treatment of ca. 14% is still significantly larger than the error rate. Since

resistance is not observed and cannot be used as a signal to the paternalist, it must result from a genuine preference to

have authored the solution.

Preference for authorship can explain why subjects want to keep control in various experiments. Subjects are, for

example, unwilling to use algorithms that are far better in predicting outcomes than they are—unless they can have

some small effect on the predicted result (Dietvorst, Simmons, & Massey, 2016). Likewise, they prefer to take a decision

themselves when interacting with humans (Bobadilla‐Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017; Dominguez‐Martinez, Sloof, &

von Siemens, 2014; Fehr, Schmidt, Herz, & Wilkening, 2013). Neri and Rommeswinkel (2014), for example, show that

subjects are interference‐averse in the sense that they prefer others not to affect their payoff. People want to maintain

this control, even if this entails material losses (Bartling, Fehr, & Herz, 2014; Owens, Grossman, & Fackler, 2014). In

Owens et al. (2014), for example, subjects prefer to get a premium if they have correctly answered a quiz question to

getting the same premium when another person has correctly answered a different quiz, although they believe that the

other person is more likely to answer correctly. They thus lose in expected terms from insisting on their solution.

Probably, the closest paper to ours is Sloof and von Siemens (2017), where subjects pay for being able to decide

which of two identical lotteries is played rather than letting another (equally badly informed) subject choose. They

argue convincingly that the reason is that subjects believe that they can affect the outcome of the lottery in their favor

by maintaining control over this meaningless choice.

In all these studies, subjects pay a price and can then affect some outcome. Their willingness to pay may thus either

come from the desire to change this outcome or from having authored this outcome. Differing from these studies, the

first explanation is excluded here by not allowing the agent to alter the outcome.

Sloof and von Siemens (forthcoming) examine how a worker responds to different ways of ending up with the same

undesirable project. First, the project may have been chosen by the worker herself who by design is unable to identify a

project that is more beneficial. Second, it may have been knowingly selected by another subject (manager) instead of the

more beneficial project. When the manager deliberately puts the worker on the less attractive project, workers put in

less effort and thereby harm the manager. In other words, the worker's reciprocate the manager's behavior. In our

experiment, we eliminate reciprocity by not giving the agent the power to change the principal's payoff following

interference.

By eliminating the desire to alter the outcome and reciprocity as explanations for resistance, our design can cleanly

identify preferences for authorship.

LÜBBECKE AND SCHNEDLER

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