Intention and Stochastic Outcomes: An Experimental study
实验发现，人们对他人的奖惩不仅取决于最终结果，还强烈取决于对方的意图，即使好意图因运气不好而没带来好结果，人们仍会给予正面回应。
Do people care about intentions – even when good intentions do not produce good results? In our experiments we find that rates of punishment and reward react strongly to intentions (the wage a firm decides to pay) and more modestly to distributional outcomes (the higher or lower wage actually received including the stochastic component). For example, workers who end up receiving medium wages respond much more positively when this resulted from the firm offering a high wage but bad luck lowered the worker’s pay than when this resulted from the firm offering a low wage and good luck raised the pay. Outcomes for any given situation often depend on a combination of intentional choices and luck. To assess the importance of good intentions, we ask: under what circumstances do people pay attention to outcomes, and under what circumstances do they focus on intentions? Considerable evidence indicates that monetary reward is not the only motivation present among economic agents; social preferences such as altruism and reciprocity play roles as well.1 From Adam’s (1965) classic equity theory to recent economic models of fairness, many social scientists have extended the assumption of self-interested preferences to