Altruism in Anonymous Dictator Games

We conduct double-anonymous dictator experiments to explore the role of altruism in motivating subjects' behavior. We vary the extent to which an anonymous recipient is deserving of aid and investigate its effect on the allocation of a fixed pie by student subjects. This is accomplished by including as treatments: (1) an anonymous student subject and (2) an established charity. We find that a significant increase in donations occurs when we increase the extent to which a donation goes to a recipient generally agreed to be “deserving.” We conclude that subjects are rational in the way they incorporate fairness into their decisions.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: A13, C91, D64.     

Relative versus Absolute Speed of Adjustment in Strategic Environments: Responder Behavior in Ultimatum Games

Learning models predict that the relative speed at which players in a game adjust their behavior has a critical influence on long term behavior. In an ultimatum game, the prediction is that proposers learn not to make small offers faster than responders learn not to reject them. We experimentally test whether relative speed of learning has the predicted effect, by manipulating the amount of experience accumulated by proposers and responders. The experiment allows the predicted learning by responders to be observed, for the first time.     

Timing and Virtual Observability in Ultimatum Bargaining and “Weak Link” Coordination Games

Previous studies have shown that simply knowing one player moves first can affect behavior in games, even when the first-mover's moves are known to be unobservable. This observation violates the game-theoretic principle that timing of unobserved moves is irrelevant, but is consistent with virtual observability, a theory of how timing can matter without the ability to observe actions. However, this previous research only shows that timing matters in games where knowledge that one player moved first can help select that player's preferred equilibrium, presenting an alternative explanation to virtual observability. We extend this work by varying timing of unobservable moves in ultimatum bargaining games and “weak link” coordination games. In the latter, the equilibrium selection explanation does not predict any change in behavior due to timing differences. We find that timing without observability affects behavior in both games, but not substantially.     

Learning to Accept in Ultimatum Games: Evidence from an Experimental Design that Generates Low Offers

Focusing on responder behavior, we report panel data findings from both low and high stakes ultimatum bargaining games. Whereas Slonim and Roth (1998) find that offers are rejected fairly equally across rounds in both low and high stakes games, we find that learning does take place, but only when there is sufficient money on the table. The disparate results can be reconciled when one considers the added power that our experimental design provides-detecting subtle temporal differences in responder behavior requires a data generation process that induces a significant number of proportionally low offers.     

The Impact of Exchange Context on the Activation of Equity in Ultimatum Games

In this paper we report the results of additional exchange ultimatum game experiments conducted at the same time as the exchange ultimatum game experiments reported in Hoffman et al. (Games and Economic Behavior, 7(3), pp. 346–380, 1994). In these additional experiments, we use instructions to change an impersonal exchange situation to a personal exchange situation. To do this, we prompt sellers to consider what choices their buyers will make. Game theory would predict that thinking about the situation would lead sellers to make smaller offers to buyers. In contrast, we find a significant increase in seller offers to buyers. This result suggests that encouraging sellers to thinking about buyer choices focuses their attention on the strategic interaction with humans who think they way they do in personal exchange situations, and who may punish them for unacceptable behavior, and not on the logic of the game theoretic structure of the problem.     

Volunteers and Pseudo-Volunteers: The Effect of Recruitment Method in Dictator Experiments

We report the results of experiments that test for behavioral differences between volunteer subjects recruited in the usual way and pseudo-volunteer subjects in experiments conducted during class time. In a series of dictator games, we find that psuedo-volunteers are more generous on average than their volunteer counterparts, and that non-monetary factors such as religious or altruistic preferences have a greater effect on the giving behavior of pseudo-volunteers.     

Economic Evaluation of Health-care Programmes: Is CEA Better than CBA?

It has been noted earlier that during the same period that the contingent valuation (CV) method evolved and became the most commonly used method of valuing environmental projects, the development in health economics was instead been towards cost–effectiveness analysis (CEA). Recently there has been a growing interest in the use of CEA, where QALYs (quality-adjusted life-years) are used as a measure of effectiveness, as the method of evaluation for environmental projects. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question – is CEA a superior method to CBA (both theoretically and empirically) to provide information to decision makers for use in decisions on resource allocation in health. The paper deals with the following topics: the underlying theoretical foundation for CEA; is CEA free of income distribution considerations?; is QALY a superior measure to WTP?; the usefulness of incremental CE ratio (ICER) to determine resource allocation. The paper concludes that there is neither theoretical nor practical support for the claim about the superiority of CEA.     

Sex Differences in the Ultimatum Game: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective

In the two-person ultimatum game, an allocator is required to split a given sum of money with a recipient. Subsequently the recipient can either accept or reject the offer. If it is accepted, both players receive their respective splits, while if it is rejected neither of them get anything. Using evolutionary psychology as the theoretical framework, we predicted and found that males made more generous offers when pitted against a female as opposed to a male. While females made equal offers independently of the sex of the recipient. That male allocators are altruistic towards female recipients and competitive with male recipients is construed as a manifestation of social rules, which evolve from the male pre-disposition to use resources for attracting mates. In contrast, females have not evolved such a pre-disposition, and thus, female allocators are more concerned about fairness when making offers to recipients. Several alternate explanations of the above findings are discussed and the evolutionary explanation is concluded as the most parsimonious one. Other potential moderators that are amenable to evolutionary explanations, namely, physical attractiveness, age and ethnicity of participants, are also discussed in this context. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cultural Differences in Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis

This paper reports the findings of a meta-analysis of 37 papers with 75 results from ultimatum game experiments. We find that on average the proposer offers 40% of the pie to the responder. This share is smaller for larger pie sizes and larger when a strategy method is used or when subjects are inexperienced. On average 16% of the offers is rejected. The rejection rate is lower for larger pie sizes and for larger shares offered. Responders are less willing to accept an offer when the strategy method is employed. As the results come from different countries, meta-analysis provides an alternative way to investigate whether bargaining behavior in ultimatum games differs across countries. We find differences in behavior of responders (and not of proposers) across geographical regions. With one exception, these differences cannot be attributed to various cultural traits on which for instance the cultural classifications of Hofstede (1991) and Inglehart (2000) are based.     

Reinforcement and Directional Learning in the Ultimatum Game with Responder Competition

Demands in the Ultimatum Game in its traditional form with one proposer and one responder are compared with demands in an Ultimatum Game with responder competition. In this modified form one proposer faces three responders who can accept or reject the split of the pie. Initial demands in both ultimatum games are quite similar, however in the course of the experiment, demands in the ultimatum game with responder competition are significantly higher than in the traditional case with repeated random matching. Individual round-to-round changes of choices that are consistent with directional learning are the driving forces behind the differences between the two learning curves and cannot be tracked by an adjustment process in response to accumulated reinforcements. The importance of combining reinforcement and directional learning is addressed. Moreover, learning transfer between the two ultimatum games is analyzed.     

Stochastic Cooperative Games: Superadditivity, Convexity, and Certainty Equivalents

This paper extends the notions of superadditivity and convexity to stochastic cooperative games. It is shown that convex games are superadditive and have nonempty cores, and that these results also hold in the context of NTU games. Furthermore, a subclass of stochastic cooperative games to which one can associate a deterministic cooperative game is considered. It is shown that such a stochastic cooperative game satisfies properties like nonemptiness of the core, superadditivity, and convexity if and only if the corresponding deterministic game satisfies these properties.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C71.     

Words, Deeds, and Lies: Strategic Behaviour in Games with Multiple Signals

We report the results of an experiment in which subjects play games against changing opponents. In one treatment, "senders" send "receivers" messages indicating intended actions in that round, and receivers observe senders' previous-round actions (when matched with another receiver). In another treatment, the receiver additionally observes the sender's previous-round message to the previous opponent, enabling him to determine whether the sender had lied. We find that allowing multiple signals leads to better outcomes when signals are aligned (all pointing to the same action), but worse outcomes when signals are crossed . Also, senders' signals tend to be truthful, though the degree of truthfulness depends on the game and treatment, and receivers' behaviour combines elements of pay-off maximization and reciprocity.     

Quasi-weightings, Trading, and Desirability Relations in Simple Games

We investigate the problem of simultaneously characterizing various classes of simple games in three different ways: (i) the existence of “quasi-weightings” in which smaller numerical values are assigned to losing coalitions than are assigned to winning ones, (ii) the robustness of “winningness” with respect to trades involving groups of players, and (iii) the acyclicity of certain strict “orderings” that intuitively correspond to the idea of one player being more desirable than another.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C71.     

Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

Research on ultimatum and dictator games has found that because of "fairness" first movers in such games offer more than noncooperative game theory predicts. We find that if the right to be the first mover is "earned" by scoring high on a general knowledge quiz, then first movers behave in a more self-regarding manner. We also conducted dictator double blind experiments, in which the experimenter could not identify the decision maker. The results yielded by far our largest observed incidence of self-regarding offers, suggesting that offers are due to strategic and expectation considerations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C91.     

Public Goods Games,Altruism, and Evolution

I analyze the evolution of altruistic preferences in a population where individuals are matched pairwise to play a one‐shot public goods game. I determine the evolutionarily stable degree of altruism, allowing for assortative matching. The stable degree of altruism is strictly smaller than the degree of assortativity. In particular, if matching is completely random, spite is stable, and a positive degree of assortativity is necessary for pure selfishness to be stable. Furthermore, the stable degree of altruism is increasing in the degree of assortativity, and it depends on the specifics of the public goods game.     

A Party in Europe,But a Hangover is Coming北大核心CSSCISSCI

The euro will live another day, but it remains on life support. The markets rallied overnight on word that the German constitutional court had affirmed the Fatherland’s role in the European bailout scheme, allowing the European Central Bank to heat up the printing presses. That was followed by reports that pro-euro parties were in the lead in a critical national election in the Netherlands, putting an end to concerns that one of the eurozone’s strongest members could fly the coop.