Risk Taking Under Limited Liability and Moral Hazard: Quantifying the Role of Motivated Beliefs
通过实验发现，有限责任和道德风险会促使投资者形成动机信念，自我合理化过度风险承担；超过三分之一的投资增长可由动机信念解释，且这种信念是潜意识的，甚至导致投资者在可能伤害第三方时承担更大风险。
This paper investigates whether limited liability and moral hazard affect risk taking through motivated beliefs. On the one hand, limited liability encourages investors to take excessive risks. On the other, excessive risk taking makes it hard for investors to maintain a positive self-image when moral hazard is present. Using a novel experimental design, we show that subjects form motivated beliefs to self-justify their excessive risk taking. For the same investment opportunity, subjects invest more and are significantly more optimistic about the success of the investment if its failure can harm others. We show that more than one third of the investment increases under limited liability, and moral hazard can be explained through motivated beliefs. Moreover, through a treatment with limited liability but no moral hazard, we show that motivated beliefs are formed subconsciously and can lead to the paradoxical result of investors taking larger risks when their investment can harm a third party compared with when it cannot. These results underscore the importance of motivated beliefs in regulatory policy, emphasizing that policymakers must not only address bad incentives, but also address the role of bad beliefs. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance. Funding: Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant CRC TRR 190, project number 280092119] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03947 .