People do not like to delegate the distribution of favors. To explain this reluctance we disentangle reward motives in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the transfer values of investor and delegate,...

Machiavelli advises against delegating the distribution of favors. We test this claim in an experiment, in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the value of the transfers of the investor and the delegate, we find that...

Many scholars argue that the delegation of decision rights to independent institutions promotes trust and specific investments. We test this conjecture with variations of the trust game in which the back transfer decision is delegated to a third party. A randomly chosen third party with a fixed...