FAVOURING FRIENDS

This paper focuses on the friendship effect on donations in a dictator game. Our results indicate that the taste for altruism is substantially increased when friends play the role of recipients. Controlling for reciprocity there is still a significant friendship effect on donations.     

Are benevolent dictators altruistic in groups? A within-subject design

We use a within-subject experimental design to investigate whether systematic relationships exist across distinct features of individual preferences: altruism in a two-person context, risk aversion in monetary outcomes, and social preferences in a group context. We find that altruism is related to demographic variables, including years of education, gender, and age. Perhaps most importantly, self allocation in a two-person dictator game is related to social preferences in a group context. Participants who are more generous in a dictator game are more likely to vote against their self-interest in a group tax redistribution game which we interpret to be an expression of social preferences.     

How competitiveness may cause a gender wage gap: Experimental evidence

We show that choices in competitive behavior may entail a gender wage gap. In our experiments, employees first choose a remuneration scheme (competitive tournament vs. piece rate) and then conduct a real-effort task. Employers know the pie size the employee has generated, the remuneration scheme chosen, and the employee׳s gender. Employers then decide how the pie will be split, as in a dictator game. Whereas employers do not discriminate by gender when tournaments are chosen, they take substantially and significantly more from female employees who choose piece-rate remuneration. A discriminatory wage gap occurs which cannot be attributed to employees׳ performance.     

Group polarization in the team dictator game reconsidered

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group polarization by letting subjects make individual as well as team decisions in an experimental dictator game. In our experiment teams are more selfish than individuals, and the most selfish team member has the strongest influence on team decisions. Various explanations for the different findings in Cason and Mui (1997) and in our paper are discussed.      

Are women expected to be more generous?

This paper analyzes if men and women are expected to behave differently regarding altruism. Since the dictator game provides the most suitable design for studying altruism and generosity in the lab setting, we use a modified version to study the beliefs involved in the game. Our results are substantial: men and women are expected to behave differently. Moreover, while women believe that women are more generous, men consider that women are as generous as men.

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Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. We appreciate comments from Josemari Aizpurua, Shoshana Neuman and participants in seminars at Bar-Ilan University, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Univ. Publica Navarra. Tim Cason and one anonymous referee made substantial comments on the previous draft. Financial support from CICYT (SEJ2007-62081/ECON and SEJ2006-00959/SOCI) and FCEA (SOC2.05/43) is gratefully acknowledge. Martha Gaustad revised the English grammar.     

Motives for sharing in social networks

What motivates people in rural villages to share? We first elicit a baseline level of sharing using a standard, anonymous dictator game. Then using variants of the dictator game that allow for either revealing the dictator's identity or allowing the dictator to choose the recipient, we attribute variation in sharing to three different motives. The first of these, directed altruism, is related to preferences, while the remaining two are incentive-related (sanctions and reciprocity). We observe high average levels of sharing in our baseline treatment, while variation across individuals depends importantly on the incentive-related motives. Finally, variation in measured reciprocity within the experiment predicts observed ‘real-world’ gift-giving, while other motives measured in the experiment do not predict behavior outside the experiment.     

Effect of religious priming in prosocial and destructive behaviour

In this paper, we study the behavioural impact of religious priming by showing participants religious words in a scrambled sentence task before a dictator game and a joy‐of‐destruction game. We also elicited data on individual religiosity and religious affiliation using a questionnaire. Priming religious words significantly increased prosocial behaviour in the dictator game, and the effect was especially striking among those reporting no religion, atheists and agnostics. The religious prime has no significant effect in mitigating destructive behaviour or own expectations of the other's destruction choice, but both destructive behaviour and expectations correlate positively with the multi‐dimensional religiosity measure.     

You are not in my boat: common fate and discrimination against outgroup members

Sharing a common fate with some people but not others may affect how economic agents behave in economic transactions, quite independently of strategic incentives. We present an experimental test of the effect of perceptions of common fate on the inducement of economic discrimination in bilateral settings. In settings where the bargaining power was all with one subject (the dictator game and a ‘unilateral power game’), about half of the subjects engaged in negative discrimination: insiders were not treated better relative to control sessions, but outsiders were treated worse. Discrimination may be induced by a more conflictual perception of the decision problem.     

Reciprocity and Giving in a Consecutive Three‐Person Dictator Game with Social Interaction

We study pure indirect reciprocity by setting up a modified dictator game with three players A, B, and C acting sequentially. Subject A takes a share of a pie and passes the rest to subject B, while B divides the rest between herself and C. We find that this consecutive three‐person dictator game increases generosity compared with the traditional two‐person dictator game. We analyze the influence of social interaction and uncertainty. In treatments with certainty we observe pure indirect reciprocity: B indirectly reciprocates for A's behavior in the decision on how generous to be to C.     

Why volunteer? Evidence on the role of altruism,image, and incentives

We examine motivations for prosocial behavior using new data on volunteer firefighters that contain a dictator game based measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other behavioral factors, and call records that provide an objective measure of time spent volunteering. Controlling for a variety of other explanations, we find that the decision to volunteer is positively correlated with altruism as well as with concern for social reputation or “image.” Moreover, by utilizing variation in the presence and level of small stipends paid to the firefighters, we find that the positive effect of monetary incentives declines with image concerns, supporting a prediction that extrinsic incentives can crowd out image motivation for prosocial behavior.     

Revisiting the impact of impure public goods on consumers’ prosocial behavior: A lab experiment in Shanghai

In this study, we implemented a dictator game experiment to examine how the increase of the public characteristic in an impure public good affects individuals’ prosocial behaviour. A within‐subject design was used in the experiment. The dictator game was repeated six times with an impure public good introduced in four of them. We observe that the increase of the public characteristic in an impure public good partly crowds out individuals’ subsequent donations, which could be explained by a seemingly ‘mental accounting’ mental process. In addition, we also find that the selfish behaviour of individuals in dictator games with impure public goods, to some extent, has an inertia influence on their subsequent donations when the impure public good is removed.     

Reciprocity—an indirect evolutionary analysis

This paper investigates agents who face a stylized pecuniary ‘game of life’ comprising the ultimatum game and the dictator game. Utility may but need not be attached to equity and reciprocity, as formalized by Falk and Fischbacher (Games Econom Behav, 54(2): 293–315, 2006) but, critically, this social component of preferences cannot be conditioned on whether an ultimatum or a dictator game is played. Evolutionary fitness of agents is determined solely by material success. Under these conditions, a strong preference for reciprocity, but little interest in equity as such evolves. Possible exogenous constraints that link reciprocity and equity concerns imply long-run levels of both which depend on the relative frequency of ultimatum vs. dictator interaction in agents’ multi-game environment. Financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Contagion of Self‐Interested Behavior: Evidence from Group Dictator Game Experiments

We examine how group decision‐making affects other‐regarding behavior in experimental dictator games. In particular, we assess whether the effects of iterated games differ for group and individual decision‐making and whether the difference in decision‐making style (individual or group) changes the perception of social identity. We make two findings on group decision‐making. First, group decisions become more selfish when repeating the game after changing group members. Second, a dictator group donates more to a recipient group at the same university than to a recipient group at a different university. These findings are not true for individual decision‐making.     

Of mice and men: Within gender variation in strategic behavior

We study behavioral differences across and within genders in a family of ultimatum and dictator games. We find these differences are due not only to altruistic preferences but also beliefs about the strategic behavior of others. The behavior of men in strategic situations is not significantly more aggressive than women on average. But this average masks wide variation in intra-gender behavior. In particular, a sizable minority of males are “mice,” behaving timidly in strategic environments. Our experimental design shows that the standard ultimatum game can mask significant inter- and intra-gender differences in strategic behavior. These behavioral patterns in strategic environments are shown to be correlated with preferences for altruism in non-strategic settings. Such gender differences could well manifest themselves in real-world large-stakes transactions, such as salary negotiations.     

Of mice and men: Within gender variation in strategic behavior

We study behavioral differences across and within genders in a family of ultimatum and dictator games. We find these differences are due not only to altruistic preferences but also beliefs about the strategic behavior of others. The behavior of men in strategic situations is not significantly more aggressive than women on average. But this average masks wide variation in intra-gender behavior. In particular, a sizable minority of males are “mice,” behaving timidly in strategic environments. Our experimental design shows that the standard ultimatum game can mask significant inter- and intra-gender differences in strategic behavior. These behavioral patterns in strategic environments are shown to be correlated with preferences for altruism in non-strategic settings. Such gender differences could well manifest themselves in real-world large-stakes transactions, such as salary negotiations.     

Asymmetric Information in Simple Bargaining Games: An Experimental Study

Bilateral bargaining situations are often characterized by informational asymmetries concerning the size of what is at stake: in some cases, the proposer is better informed, in others, it is the responder. We analyze the effects of both types of asymmetric information on proposer behavior in two different situations which allow for a variation of responder veto power: the ultimatum and the dictator game. We find that the extent to which proposers demand less in the ultimatum as compared to the dictator game is (marginally) smaller when the proposer is in the superior information position. Further we find informed proposers to exploit their informational advantage by offering an amount that does not reveal the true size of the pie, with proposers in the ultimatum game exhibiting this behavioral pattern to a larger extent than those in the dictator game. Uninformed proposers risk imposed rejection when they ask for more than potentially is at stake, and ask for a risk premium in dictator games. We concentrate on proposers, but also explore responder behavior: We find uninformed responders to enable proposers’ hiding behavior, and we find proposer intentionality not to play an important role for informed responders when they decide whether to accept or reject an offer by an (uninformed) proposer.     

Voice matters in a dictator game

We conducted a laboratory experiment to study the effects of communication in a dictator game, while maintaining subjects’ anonymity. In the experiment, the recipient has an opportunity to state a payoff-irrelevant request for his/her share before the dictator dictates his/her offer. We found that the independence hypothesis that voice does not matter is rejected. In particular, if the request is for less than half of the pie, the dictator’s offer increases as the recipient’s request increases. Additionally, there is no dictator who is other-regarding and, at the same time, does not react to the recipient’s request.

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Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.      

Testing subgame perfection apart from fairness in ultimatum games

We present an experiment designed to separate the two commonplace explanations for behavior in ultimatum games—subjects’ concern for fairness versus the failure of subgame perfection as an equilibrium refinement. We employ a tournament structure of the bargaining interaction to eliminate the potential for fairness to influence behavior. Comparing the results of the tournament game with two control treatments affords us a clean test of subgame perfection as well as a measure fairness-induced play. We find after 10 iterations of play that about half of all non-subgame-perfect demands are due to fairness, and the rest to imperfect learning. However, as suggested by models of learning, we also confirm that the ultimatum game presents an especially difficult environment for learning subgame perfection. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at . JEL Classification C91, D64, J52     

What is in a surname? The role of ethnicity in economic decision making

This article reports results from two experiments that investigate possible incidence of discrimination against people with foreign backgrounds in Sweden. In the first experiment, participants played the trust game and the dictator game with co-players of different ethnic affiliation. The family name of the players was exposed to their co-players. Results for the trust game showed no significant discrimination against co-players with foreign backgrounds. On the other hand, the results for the dictator game showed a statistically significant discriminatory behaviour by men against co-players with non-European backgrounds. The discriminatory behaviour was solely a male phenomenon. In the second experiment, the dictator game was replicated to check the stability of the results in the first experiment. The second experiment also examined whether people with foreign backgrounds discriminate against other people with foreign backgrounds; that is, the purpose was to discover whether discrimination is systematic. The observations in the second experiment underlined the results found in the first experiment: foreign co-players are discriminated against by Swedish players. However, we did not find that people with foreign backgrounds discriminated against other people with foreign backgrounds.     

Altruistic behavior in a representative dictator experiment

We conduct a representative dictator game in which students and random members of the community choose both what charity to support and how much to donate to the charity. We find systematic differences between the choices of students and community members. Community members are much more likely to write in their own charity, community members donate significantly more ($17), on average, and community members are much more likely (32%) to donate the entire $100 endowment. Based on this evidence, it does not appear that student behavior is very representative in the context of the charitable donations and the dictator game.

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Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.