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Decision Making for Others Involving Risk: A Review and Meta-Analysis

Sartre says when we choose, we choose for others (1943) - implying that when people make a choice, they make it not only for their own consumption but for others' consumption as well. Sartre's observation hints that decision making is fundamentally social and interpersonal, with inputs and...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Poiman, Evan, Wu, Kaiyang
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
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Summary:Sartre says when we choose, we choose for others (1943) - implying that when people make a choice, they make it not only for their own consumption but for others' consumption as well. Sartre's observation hints that decision making is fundamentally social and interpersonal, with inputs and outputs that extend beyond the individual decision maker. For example, when someone accepts a risky gamble and wins a considerable sum of money, the winnings will not only benefit the winner, but benefit others whom are close to the winner. Likewise, if someone loses a lot of money, close others will be adversely affected in kind. However, most research on decision making treats decision making like it is solitary. With relatively few exceptions (e.g., Gorlin and Dhar 2013, Lamberton 2018), the literature has not considered, much less tested, the special role that others' consumption may play when making decisions. In the current research, we examine the most straightforward type of decision that pertains to others' consumption: a decision that is made by one person for another, in which the other person (for whom the decision is made) bears the direct ends of the choice. In particular, we focus on whether people make riskier decisions for others than they make for themselves. Recently, there has been a growing interest in this question. In the last five years alone, we have identified 42 papers on this topic. However, the accumulating evidence to date, as manifested in over 100 findings, has been inconclusive. For example, a number of studies have found strong instances of a "risky shift" - i.e., a tendency to make riskier choices for others - while other studies have found no such effect or have found that choices for others instead generate a "cautious shift" - i.e., a tendency to make more cautious choices for others. Considering the mixed state of the research, we conducted a meta-analysis by collecting and reviewing a variety of findings from across the social sciences, in the service of shedding light on this important and practically-relevant question, do people make riskier choices for others? How important is this question? Very; because the answer has important theoretical and practical, marketing implications. From a theoretical perspective, the most widespread model in research on decision making, prospect theory (Tversky and Kahneman 1992), applies robustly to decisions people make for themselves; however recent advances have found that when it comes to cho
ISSN:0098-9258