Previous experiments on representative decision making find that social responsibility alters risk-taking behavior relative to individuals making decisions for only themselves. However, these experiments confer the position of social responsibility through random assignment. In the field, people who are responsible for making decisions on behalf of others typically do not assume the position by pure chance, but instead ‘earn’ social responsibility on a basis of merit. Experiments on earned roles in other areas of economics suggest this may induce more self-regarding behavior. We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate how self-determining one's role as a representative decision maker influences subsequent risk-taking behavior. Using a one-shot binary lottery choice and a between-subjects design, we compare the risk-taking behavior of representatives under randomly assigned social responsibility with that of representatives under earned responsibility and with that of participants making decisions only for themselves. We find that when participants earn social responsibility through performance in a pre-game task, they report considering their dependents less and exhibit significantly more risk taking than those who receive responsibility through random assignment. Those who earn social responsibility behave like individuals without dependents, while those who receive social responsibility through random assignment—consistent with previous studies—display less risk taking (over moderate probability gains prospects) than individuals operating by themselves.

先前关于代表性决策的实验发现，相对于仅由自己做出决策的个人而言，社会责任改变了冒险行为。但是，这些实验通过随机分配赋予了社会责任地位。在实地，负责代表他人做决定的人通常不会纯粹凭偶然的机会担任这一职位，而是根据功绩“赢得”社会责任。关于在其他经济学领域中获得的角色的实验表明，这可能会引发更多的自以为是的行为。我们进行实验室实验，以研究自我决定者作为代表决策者的角色如何影响随后的冒险行为。使用一键式二元彩票选择和主题间设计，我们将承担随机分配社会责任的代表与承担责任的代表以及仅由自己做出决定的参与者的冒险行为进行比较。我们发现，当参与者通过在赛前任务中表现来获得社会责任时，他们报告说，与那些通过随机分配而承担责任的人相比，他们更少考虑自己的家属，并且承担更大的冒险风险。承担社会责任的人的行为就像没有受抚养人的个人，而那些通过随机分配来承担社会责任的人（与先前的研究一致）显示出的风险承担（中等概率的增长前景）要比自己经营的人要少。