Abstract

The ways in which the decisions we make for others differ from the ones we make for ourselves has received much attention in the literature, although less is known about their relationship to our predictions of the recipient’s preferences. The latter question is of particular importance given real-world occurrences of surrogate decision-making which require surrogates to consider the recipient’s preferences. We conducted three experiments which explore this relationship in the medical and financial domains. Although there were mean discrepancies between surrogate predictions and choices, we identified a predictive relationship between the two. Moreover, when participants took high risks for themselves, it seems that they were not willing to do so for others, even when they believed that the recipient’s preferences were similar to their own. We discuss these findings relative to current theories and real-world instances of surrogate decision-making.

摘要

我们为他人做出的决策与我们自己做出的决策不同的方式在文献中得到了很大的关注，尽管人们对它们与我们对接受者偏好的预测之间的关系知之甚少。考虑到代理决策在现实世界中的发生，这需要代理考虑接收者的偏好，后一个问题特别重要。我们进行了三个实验，探索了医学和金融领域的这种关系。尽管替代预测和选择之间存在平均差异，但我们确定了两者之间的预测关系。此外，当参与者自己冒高风险时，即使他们认为接受者的偏好与自己的偏好相似，他们似乎也不愿意为他人冒险。