IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/euvwdp/308.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Passing the buck

Author

Listed:
  • Bolle, Friedel

Abstract

Shifting the responsibility for a necessary but costly action to someone else is often called Passing the Buck. Examples of such behavior in politics are environmental and budget problems which are left to future generations. Small group examples are (not) washing the dishes or (not) dealing with a difficult customer. Under the assumption of altruistic preferences, rational behavior in this game is derived and confronted with experimental data. By comparison, the sequence of possible decision makers in the normal Passing the Buck game is substituted with an expert who alone is competent to fix the problem. It turned out that the marginal probabilities of shifting the responsibility are in good accordance with the theoretical model, although with completely different parameter distributions for experts and non-experts. The structure of the individual decisions, however, is best described by a random parameter model (Cox et al., 2007).

Suggested Citation

  • Bolle, Friedel, 2011. "Passing the buck," Discussion Papers 308, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:euvwdp:308
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/52142/1/672633043.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Chen, Xiao-Ping & Au, Wing Tung & Komorita, S. S., 1996. "Sequential Choice in a Step-Level Public Goods Dilemma: The Effects of Criticality and Uncertainty," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 37-47, January.
    2. Philip A. Haile & Ali Hortaçsu & Grigory Kosenok, 2008. "On the Empirical Content of Quantal Response Equilibrium," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(1), pages 180-200, March.
    3. R. Mark Isaac & James M. Walker, 1988. "Group Size Effects in Public Goods Provision: The Voluntary Contributions Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 103(1), pages 179-199.
    4. Diekmann, Andreas, 1993. "Cooperation in an Asymmetric Volunteer's Dilemma Game: Theory and Experimental Evidence," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 22(1), pages 75-85.
    5. Ido Erev & Amnon Rapoport, 1990. "Provision of Step-Level Public Goods," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 34(3), pages 401-425, September.
    6. David K. Levine, 1998. "Modeling Altruism and Spitefulness in Experiment," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 1(3), pages 593-622, July.
    7. Cox, James C. & Friedman, Daniel & Gjerstad, Steven, 2007. "A tractable model of reciprocity and fairness," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 17-45, April.
    8. Bilodeau, Marc & Slivinski, Al, 1996. "Toilet cleaning and department chairing: Volunteering a public service," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 299-308, February.
    9. Richard Mckelvey & Thomas Palfrey, 1998. "Quantal Response Equilibria for Extensive Form Games," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 1(1), pages 9-41, June.
    10. Hironori Otsubo & Amnon Rapoport, 2008. "Dynamic Volunteer's Dilemmas over a Finite Horizon," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 52(6), pages 961-984, December.
    11. Friedel Bolle & Alexander Kritikos, 2006. "Reciprocity, Altruism, Solidarity: A Dynamic Model," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 60(4), pages 371-394, June.
    12. Philip A. Haile & Ali Hortaçsu & Grigory Kosenok, 2004. "On the Empirical Content of Quantal Response Models," Levine's Bibliography 122247000000000218, UCLA Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bolle, Friedel, 2014. "On a class of threshold public goods games: With applications to voting and the Kyoto Protocol," Discussion Papers 345, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    2. Tajika, Tomoya & 多鹿, 智哉, 2017. "Organizational Concealment: An Incentive of Reducing the Responsibility," Discussion Paper Series 667, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bolle, Friedel, 2017. "Passing the Buck On the acceptance of responsibility," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(1), pages 86-101.
    2. Jörg Spiller & Friedel Bolle, 2017. "Experimental investigations of coordination games: high success rates, invariant behavior, and surprising dynamics," Discussion Paper Series RECAP15 28, RECAP15, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder).
    3. Spiller, Jörg & Bolle, Friedel, 2017. "Experimental investigations of binary threshold public good games," Discussion Papers 393, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    4. Bolle, Friedel, 2014. "On a class of threshold public goods games: With applications to voting and the Kyoto Protocol," Discussion Papers 345, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    5. Friedel Bolle, 2014. "Binary Threshold Public Goods," Discussion Paper Series RECAP15 14, RECAP15, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder).
    6. Friedel Bolle & Philipp E. Otto, 2022. "The flip side of power," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 190(1), pages 75-92, January.
    7. Ambrus, Attila & Pathak, Parag A., 2011. "Cooperation over finite horizons: A theory and experiments," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(7), pages 500-512.
    8. Kurt A. Ackermann & Ryan O. Murphy, 2019. "Explaining Cooperative Behavior in Public Goods Games: How Preferences and Beliefs Affect Contribution Levels," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(1), pages 1-34, March.
    9. Kranz, Sebastian, 2010. "Moral norms in a partly compliant society," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 255-274, January.
    10. Yixuan Shi, 2022. "Dynamic Volunteer's Dilemma with Procrastinators," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2022-17, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    11. Bosworth, Steven J. & Singer, Tania & Snower, Dennis J., 2016. "Cooperation, motivation and social balance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 126(PB), pages 72-94.
    12. Kloosterman, Andrew & Mago, Shakun, 2023. "The infinitely repeated volunteer's dilemma: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 812-832.
    13. Blanco, Mariana & Engelmann, Dirk & Normann, Hans Theo, 2011. "A within-subject analysis of other-regarding preferences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 321-338, June.
    14. Bolle, Friedel, 2017. "A behavioral theory of equilibrium selection," Discussion Papers 392, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    15. Bosworth, Steven J. & Singer, Tania & Snower, Dennis J., 2016. "Cooperation, motivation and social balance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 126(PB), pages 72-94.
    16. Bergstrom, Ted & Garratt, Rodney & Leo, Greg, 2019. "Let me, or let George? Motives of competing altruists," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 269-283.
    17. Bolle, Friedel & Spiller, Jörg, 2016. "Not efficient but payoff dominant: Experimental investigations of equilibrium play in binary threshold public good games," Discussion Papers 379, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
    18. Kerschbamer, Rudolf, 2015. "The geometry of distributional preferences and a non-parametric identification approach: The Equality Equivalence Test," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 85-103.
    19. Greiner, Ben, 2023. "Strategic uncertainty aversion in bargaining — Experimental evidence," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    20. Pol Campos-Mercade, 2020. "When are groups less moral than individuals?," CEBI working paper series 20-26, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:euvwdp:308. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fwffode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.