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Xiaogeng Xu disputerer for doktorgraden ved NHH 30. september 2019 med avhandlingen «Decision making on behalf of others».

PhD-kandidat Xiaogeng Xu, Institutt for samfunnsøkonomi, NHH.

People always make decisions without knowing the outcome for sure. An individual takes some action that leads to a probability distribution of possible outcomes.

This thesis is devoted to expanding our understanding about decision making on behalf of others by investigating the factors, both external and intrinsic, that have not been investigated in existing studies.

The first paper studies whether and how people's ambiguity attitudes differ between decisions on behalf of others and for oneself in loss domain. There are two main findings. First, in decision making on behalf of others, Xu and her co-authors find the ambiguity attitudes in line with the loss part of the four fold pattern in decision making for oneself. Second, ambiguity attitudes do not differ between deciding for oneself and deciding on behalf of others in loss domain.

The second paper studies the societal decision making in provision of social assistance. This study investigates how the welfare institution influences decision making in provision of social assistance remains, which is still an open question in public behavioral economics.

The last paper, titled "Risk taking on behalf of others: Does the timing of uncertainty revelation matter?" is co-authored with Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen and Bertil Tungodden. They present a novel study of the effect of the timing of uncertainty revelation on risk taking on behalf of others. In particular, they study risk taking behavior in situations where the decision maker never learns about how uncertainty is resolved, a class of situations that can only happen in risk taking on behalf of others.

Xu´s results provide implications in many real life decisions that are made on behalf of others, especially of those the outcomes will ever remain unknown for the decision makers. Overall, the results presented in the three papers extend our understanding of other regarding decision behavior.