Abstract
When making a choice in real-world situations such as investing or making larger purchases, decision makers often trust others’ experience. Commonly, such as in financial advice, there is a principal-agent relationship between decision maker and advisor, with the advisor collecting information by experience for one or multiple clients. Literature on decisions from experience so far has focused mostly on individual decision making, i.e. situations where decision makers gather information for themselves and then make a choice. We aim to provide insights into the linkage between information gathering and actual decision making, when both processes are handled by different persons. We test the fundamentals of such processes in a controlled laboratory setting. We vary the degree of responsibility agents have to collect information by having them either i) just gather information, ii) also provide a recommendation, or iii) also make a choice for the client. We contrast these results to decision makers collecting information and making decisions for themselves.