Me, You or AI? How do we Feel about Delegation.

Driven by the growing availability of data and information paired with the human brain’s limited pro-cessing capabilities, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an increasingly relevant actor in strategic decision making. To leverage the potential AI provides for strategic decision making, firms rely on managers that are willing to transfer authority and control to AI-based decision systems. By analyzing the willingness to delegate strategic decisions and emotional responses to outcomes of delegated deci-sions, this research contributes to a better understanding of human behavior in decision delegation to AI in the context of strategic decisions. Based on a policy-capturing study, we find that humans are less likely to delegate a strategic decision to AI, than to another person. Further, our findings reveal that emotional responses to the outcomes of delegated decisions are more intense when responsibility was delegated to another human being, rather than to an AI-enabled system.