Title: Compliance and the power of authority - ScienceDirect
Headings: Compliance and the power of authority
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Compliance and the power of authority
Highlights
Abstract
JEL classification
Keywords
1. Introduction
3. Experimental design and hypotheses
3.1. Outline
3.2. The Open and Hidden treatments (O and H)
3.3. The Repeated question treatment (R)
Hypothesis 1
3.4. Repeated Compliance Constant pressure (RCC)
Hypothesis 2
3.5. Repeated Order (R-Order)
Hypothesis 3
3.6. Repeated Compliance (RC)
Hypothesis 4
Hypothesis 5
3.7. Repeated Compliance Justified (RCJ)
Hypothesis 6
Hypothesis 7
3.8. Repeated Compliance 1-sided (RC-1)
Hypothesis 8
4. Results
4.1. Testing the hypotheses
4.2. Supplementary analysis
5. Discussion and conclusions
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Supplementary data
References

Content: 5 In an organizational frame, Robin et al. ( 2012) found that workers are willing to change their opinions in order to comply with those of their managers. We define compliance to authority as a willingness to permit one's behavior to be determined by the experimenter. 6 We present a simple experiment on the role of compliance towards an authority, the experimenter, in an experiment where compliance damages other people's earnings at a small own monetary cost. In our experiment we examine how (in)direct cues for compliance affect participants’ willingness to comply. Additionally, we examine the implications of these cues being: ( un)justified, in the form of an order, or provided at specific intervals in time, affect participants’ compliance. In that sense our experiment also serves as an experimental study on ‘nudging’ (see Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) and particularly how different nudges affect participants’ compliance to requests by an authority. There is significant experimental evidence which suggests that some people pay taxes because they are intrinsically motivated to pay taxes or more generally to obey the law (see, e.g., Feld and Frey, 2002 or Alm and Torgler, 2006 ). In these studies paying tax is framed as a moral obligation.