Play on! A Natural Experiment on Responsibility Avoidance Thomas Bassetti∗ Stefano Boniniy Fausto Paciccoz Filippo Pavesi§ Abstract Behavioral biases affect a large number of human decisions, many of which have relevant welfare effects. We identify a bias that we denote as "responsibility avoidance" and ex- plore how the introduction of explicit exposure mechanisms can contribute to attenuate it. To do this we exploit a unique natural experiment - the introduction of a decision review system represented by player challenges and the associated Hawk-Eye technology in professional tennis. We design a natural experiment that allows us to identify the bias, by illustrating that if such a bias exists, the challenge rule should reduce the num- ber of calls that postpone the assignment of a point. Our findings may have significant policy implications providing a conceptual framework for the design of institutions to alleviate the welfare costs associated with responsibility avoidance in different contexts, such as: court rulings, human resource management and debt roll-over decisions. ∗University of Padua, Department of Economics and Management "Marco Fanno", Via del Santo 33, 35123 Padova, Italy,
[email protected] yStevens Institute of Technology. Address: School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, 1 Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA,
[email protected] zLIUC Università Carlo Cattaneo, C.so Mattteotti, 22, 21053 Castellanza (VA), Italy,
[email protected] §LIUC Università Carlo Cattaneo, C.so Mattteotti, 22, 21053 Castellanza (VA), Italy and Stevens Institute of Technology,
[email protected] 1 1. Introduction Anderson (2003) identifies four different sources of decision avoidance: status quo bias, omission bias, inaction inertia, and choice deferral.