This paper studies the role of autonomy and reciprocity in explaining control averse responses in principal …-agents interactions. While most of the social psychology literature emphasizes the role of autonomy, recent economic research has provided … an alternative explanation based on reciprocity. We propose a simple model and an experiment to test the relative …

experiment, a trust game variant, we study whether moral wiggle room also prevails, when reciprocity is a potential motivation … reciprocity. Among our subjects, 40% of the reciprocators exploited moral wiggle room. …

provided. Our binary trust game closely follows their design. Only a preceding stage (safe outside option vs. enter the game …) is added in order to introduce reciprocity. We find significantly higher rates of selfish choices in our treatments that …