From individual choices to the four-eyes principle: The big robber game revisited among financial professionals and students

Abstract

While headline news programs frequently report cases of large-scale fraud, corruption, and other immoral behavior, laboratory experiments often show prosocial behaviors in strategic games. To reconcile and explain these seemingly conflicting observations, Alós-Ferrer et al. (2022) introduced the $Big$ $Robber$ $Game$ (BRG)—an altered dictator game where one robber can take money from multiple $victims$. They reported low levels of prosocial behavior among a pool of student subjects, who behaved more prosocially in bilateral games than in the BRG. In our study, we conceptually replicate Alós-Ferrer et al. (2022) and extend the BRG to a 2x2 factorial design with over 870 participants, comparing the behavior of financial professionals and students. Moreover, inspired by the four-eyes principle, a common practice in the finance industry, we investigate decision-making both individually and in pairs. We find overall support for the results of Alós-Ferrer et al. (2022) and add that finance professionals rob less than students. Accounting for multiple hypothesis testing and control variables, we find that treatment differences disappear, indicating similar behavior across individuals, pairs, finance professionals, and students. Finally, in a series of exploratory analyses, we show that $victims$ expect finance professionals to rob significantly more than students, implying that finance professionals are considered to be less prosocial than students’ peers.