The effects of procedures on decision making : experimental evidence

There is substantial empirical evidence and increasing recognition that not only outcomes, but also the procedures leading to them, can affect people' s utility from, and their reactions to, those decisions. However, there is still a large gap between numerous studies by non-economists (e.g., psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars) and the fact that economists began to investigate the role of procedures only recently. Thus, there is still an important research agenda to be developed by economists. The dissertation contributes to this by investigating the underlying question how people react to otherwise identical decisions which came about by different procedures. Behavioral and experimental economics may serve as an important link. Its aim is to integrate the insights of cognitive and social psychologists, as well as those of experimental economists, with neoclassical economic theory. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part explores the relevance of procedures for social interaction whereas the main focus is put on recent experimental and theoretical findings in the social sciences (chapter 2). Besides, it discusses two methodological questions: First, do players decisions depend on the preference elicitation method, and second, does the approach of classifying people according to player types assist to a better understanding of behavior in experimental games (chapter 3). The second part introduces three new economic experiments for the research into procedural aspects (chapter 4-6). The objective is to analyze possible effects of (a) procedural fairness judgments, (b) procedural satisfaction, and (c) participation opportunities. Clear experimental evidence suggests that people not only value outcomes, but also the way that led to them. Thus, the dissertation contributes to a better understanding of human decision-making.