Oliver Kirchkamp

Sharing Responsibility with a Machine

Oliver Kirchkamp and Christina Strobel

Humans make decisions jointly with others. They share responsibility for the outcome with their interaction partners. Today, more and more often the partner in a decision is not another human but, instead, a machine.Here we ask whether the type of the partner, machine or human, affects our responsibility, our perception of the choice and the choice itself. As a workhorse we use a modified dictator game with two joint decision makers: either two humans or one human and one machine. We find no treatment effect on perceived responsibility or guilt. We also find only a small and insignificant effect on actual choices. We find a strong treatment effect on perceived responsibility. We do, however, find only a small and insignificant effect on actual choices.

JEL: C91, D63, D80

Keywords: Experiment, Dictator Game, Moral wiggle room, Hybrid-Decision Situation, Self-image concerns, Responsibility.