I Choose For You: an Experimental Study

We investigate whether risk and time preferences differ when individuals make decisions for others compared to making decisions for themselves. We introduce a novel skin in the game'' experimental design, where choices for others incur a direct cost to the decision-maker, ensuring a genuine trade-off between self-interest and surrogate allocation. The modal outcome is that participants are more risk-averse and impatient when choosing for others than for themselves. Our methodology reveals significant heterogeneity, successfully identifying selfish types often missed by the more standard no skin in the game’’ approaches. The message is nuanced, as even non-selfish participants behave differently when they have skin in the game. Furthermore, our framework yields more consistent behavior and superior out-of-sample predictive power.