Book Description
The main focus of this thesis is to combine the multiple findings from social psychology and apply them with an economic approach to decision making. To this purpose, we investigate accountability and its interaction with market mechanisms, more specifically real incentives in experimental settings. This PhD thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 studies the effect of accountability on ambiguity aversion-the preference for known over normatively equivalent unknown probabilities. Chapter 3 follows up on the ambiguity aversion issue by studying preference reversals under ambiguity. Chapter 4 examines the influence of accountability on risk attitude. Chapter 5 is of a methodological nature. We separate accountability and incentives, and find several effects. Accountability is found to reduce preference reversals between frames, for which incentives have no effect. Incentives on the other hand are found to reduce risk seeking for losses, where accountability has no effect.