Risk-taking for others under accountability

We let subjects take risky decisions that affect themselves and a passive recipient. Adding a requirement to justify their choices significantly reduces loss aversion. This indicates that such an accountability mechanism may be effective at debiasing loss aversion in agency relations. ► We test the effects of a justification requirement on decisions under responsibility. ► Loss aversion is found to decrease with the justification requirement. ► Choices in the pure gain and pure loss domains are unaffected. ► This points to a de-biasing mechanism for (myopic) loss aversion.