The Hidden Costs of Control:An Unsuccessful Replication Study

This note reports a replication study of Falk and Kosfeld’s (2006) medium control treatment.In the experimental game, an agent has an endowment of 120 experimental currency units anddecides how much to transfer to a principal. For every unit that the agent gives up, the principalreceives two units. Before the agent decides how much to transfer voluntarily, the principaldecides whether or not to control the agent by imposing a compulsory transfer of 10 units. Likethe original study, we observe that control entails hidden costs. Unlike the original study, we donot observe that the hidden costs of control outweigh the benefits and we observe that most ofthe principals decide to control the agent.