Voice effects on attitudes towards an impartial decision maker : experimental evidence

The opportunity to voice one's opinion about a decision is a fundamental aspect of procedural fairness and applies to a large variety of economic interactions. Voice may influence decision makers, but at the same time it shapes behavior of those who can voice their opinion. We study the latter effect in a laboratory experiment. More precisely, we analyze the impact of voicing one's opinion in a decision making process on people's attitude towards an impartial decision maker whose judgment is not biased by any personal stake. The attitude is measured by generosity towards the decision maker in a dictator game that follows the decision making process. We show that voice procedures substantially improve the attitude towards the decision maker: average transfers are 90% higher in voice treatments than in baseline. And importantly, these positive voice effects in terms of higher transfers occur irrespectively of the decision made by the decision maker. Hence, subjects seem to derive utility merely from stating their opinion rather than from influencing the decision in their favor. In that regard, our results are in contrast to previous findings from settings with self-interested decision makers (e.g., principal-agent relationships), in which voice fosters positive reciprocal behavior for favorable outcomes, as well as negative reciprocal behavior for unfavorable outcomes.