Scarcity and Decision Delegation

People frequently delegate decisions to reduce cognitive effort and responsibility, yet delegation also requires giving up control. This project examines whether resource scarcity changes this trade-off and whether its effect depends on a decision’s relevance to the scarce resource. With bandwidth and attentional tunneling accounts, this proposal seeks to examine a novel prediction that scarcity produces a general increase in delegation, and a task-specific pattern in which people retain scarcity-relevant decisions while delegating scarcity-irrelevant decisions. Four experimental studies: one pilot and three incentivized laboratory studies will examine these predictions across financial and time scarcity. Delegation will be measured through repeated choices to retain a decision or assign it to another agent. Eye-tracking and task-specific control measures will assess attention allocation and perceived control as exploratory mechanisms. The studies will also examine two proposed boundary conditions: whether outcomes affect the participants or others and whether the delegate is a human or an algorithmic agent. Focusing on decision makers’ initial motivation over delegation, this project aims to explain when scarcity encourages decision offloading and when it instead strengthens the desire to retain decision rights. The findings can advance theory on scarcity and delegation as well as inform both responsible AI design and organization design.