WiE Brown Bag Seminar - September

Join us for our first session of the WiE Brown Bag Seminar after the summer break, featuring Christine Meemann, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helmut Schmidt University (Hamburg) at the Chair of Behavioral Economics. Her research focuses on behavioural and experimental economics, with a particular emphasis on the economic value of decision rights and paternalistic preferences. She is presenting joint work with Christoph Schütt and Pauline Halm.

Trust, Autonomy & Paternalism

Abstract: 

We study whether trust causally affects attitudes toward paternalistic interventions. In an online experiment, we manipulate trust using an information prime. In a dyadic relationship, we measure both a stakeholder’s willingness-to-accept a paternalistic intervention by an expert and the expert’s willingness-to-intervene paternalistically in the stakeholder’s freedom of choice. We find that higher trust increases the willingness-to- accept paternalistic interventions by raising the belief that the expert acts in stakeholder’s best interests. However, although trust increases the expert’s perceived…