Abstract

The quality of judgment by regulatory professionals is key to good regulatory governance yet also a potential problem. Psychological studies have shown that individuals easily make judgment errors and that feeling accountable—expecting to have to explain and justify oneself—improves one’s judgments. This paper explores to what extent felt accountability improves regulatory judgment processes in more realistic settings than the traditional laboratory study. It does so in an experimental design inspired by a classic study. Samples of professional regulators and students were given a judgment task with conflicting and incomplete information under varying conditions of accountability and in a context of ambiguity. Results confirm that accountability improves professional regulators’ judgment processes in terms of decision time, accurate recall of information and absence of recency bias. However, professional regulators were significantly more accurate in their judgments than students. Our results suggest that it is important to devise appropriate forms of operational accountability for regulatory professionals that stimulate their cognitive efforts and guard against biases.

摘要

监管专业人士的判断质量是良好监管治理的关键，但也是一个潜在问题。心理学研究表明，个人很容易做出判断错误，而感觉负责——期望必须解释和证明自己——提高了一个人的判断力。本文探讨了在比传统实验室研究更现实的环境中，感觉问责制在多大程度上改善了监管判断过程。它是在受经典研究启发的实验设计中做到这一点的。在不同的问责条件和模棱两可的情况下，对专业监管者和学生的样本进行了一项判断任务，其中包含相互矛盾和不完整的信息。结果证实，问责制改善了专业监管机构在决策时间方面的判断过程，准确回忆信息并且没有新近度偏差。然而，专业监管者的判断明显比学生准确。我们的研究结果表明，重要的是为监管专业人员设计适当的运营问责形式，以激发他们的认知努力并防止偏见。