Social norms of sharing in high school: Teen giving in the dictator game

We conduct a study of altruistic behavior among high school students using the dictator game. We find a much stronger norm of equal splitting than previously observed in the typical university student population, with almost 45% of high school subjects choosing an equal split of the endowment. Tests indicate that this difference is not due to factors traditionally considered in the analysis of these games, such as demographics. Rather, we find that dictators who score higher on a Social Generosity measure are much more likely to conform to the 50/50 norm. Additionally, high school students who score in the high range of an Independence measure send significantly less to recipients.     

Anonymity in the dictator game revisited

Giving in the dictator game has often been interpreted as evidence of other-regarding preferences. We suspect that giving is determined by subjects’ attempts to appear fair in the eyes of recipients and the experimenter. Therefore, we investigate behavior in the dictator game by using the randomized response technique to increase anonymity. Overall, 290 subjects participated in two experiments. The results demonstrate that the randomized response technique reduces giving to negligible amounts compared to the standard double blind condition. Thus, our results suggest that individuals closely follow egoistic motives in the dictator game when anonymity is convincingly implemented.     

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.      

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.      

Taking,giving, and impure altruism in dictator games

We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List’s (in Journal of Political Economy 115(3):482–493, 2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent final payoff possibilities. We find that recipients tend to earn more as the amount the dictator must take to achieve a given final payoff increases, a result consistent with the hypothesis that the cold prickle of taking is stronger than the warm glow of giving. We conclude that not taking is not equivalent to giving and agree with List (in Journal of Political Economy 115(3):482–493, 2007) that the current social preference models fail to rationalize the observed data.     

Separating reputation, social influence, and identification effects in a dictator game

This study explores the ways in which information about other individual's action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The experimental design discriminates behaviorally between three possible effects of recipient's within-game reputation on the dictator's decision: Reputation causing indirect reciprocity, social influence, and identification. The separation of motives is an important step in trying to understand how impulses towards selfish or generous behavior arise. The statistical analysis of experimental data reveals that the reputation effects have a stronger impact on dictators’ actions than the social influence and identification.     

Assessing external validity

In designing any causal study, steps must be taken to address both internal and external threats to its validity. Researchers tend to focus primarily on dealing with threats to internal validity. However, once they have conducted an internally valid analysis, that analysis yields an established set of findings for the specific case in question. As for the future usefulness of that result, however, what matters is its degree of external validity. In this paper we provide a formal, general exploration of the question of external validity and propose a simple and generally applicable method for evaluating the external validity of randomized controlled trials. Although our method applies only to RCTs, the issue of external validity is general and not restricted to RCTs, as shown in our formal analysis.     

The powerless yet relevant third: a three-player ultimatum/dictator game with earned funds and roles

We report the first experiment to pair a three-player ultimatum/dictator game with a real effort task. The inclusion of the real effort task shifts the standard for division from simple egalitarianism towards relative performance; even in treatments in which roles and funds are exogenous. Additionally, we find proposers overcompensate themselves relative to their effort, and this additional compensation comes at the expense of powerless (third) players. Individual characteristics predict the nature of a proposals. Lastly, we find that responders’ choice to accept is based on their own and the powerless third party’s compensation.     

The role of role uncertainty in modified dictator games

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are the most frequent under role uncertainty (64%), selfish actions become the most frequent without role uncertainty (69%). Also, the frequency of surplus destroying choices is negligible with role uncertainty (1%) but not so without it (11%). A classification of subjects into four different types of interdependent preferences (Selfish, Social Welfare maximizing, Inequity Averse and Competitive) shows that the use of role uncertainty overestimates the prevalence of Social Welfare maximizing preferences in the subject population (from 74% with role uncertainty to 21% without it) and underestimates Selfish and Inequity Averse preferences. An additional treatment, in which subjects undertake an understanding test before participating in the experiment with role uncertainty, shows that the vast majority of subjects (93%) correctly understand the payoff mechanism with role uncertainty, but yet surplus creating actions were most frequent. Our results warn against the use of role uncertainty in experiments that aim to measure the prevalence of interdependent preferences.     

State lottery in the lab: an experiment in external validity

Experimental Economics - In this study, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which the subjects make choices between real-world lottery tickets typically purchased by lottery customers. In this...     

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.      

At the mercy of a prisoner three dictator experiments

We test male juvenile prisoners on a dictator game with another anonymous co-prisoner as recipient. Prisoners give more than students, but less than nonstudents of their age. They give more to a charity than to another prisoner. In one of two experiments, those convicted for violent crime give more than those convicted for property crime.     

Gender- and frame-specific audience effects in dictator games

We study dictator allocations using a 2×2$2\times 2$ experimental design that varies the level of anonymity and the choice set, allowing observation of audience effects in both give and take frames. Changes in the distribution of responses across treatment cells allow us to distinguish among alternative motives as elaborated in recent theory. We observe significant audience effects that vary by both frame and gender. The pattern of responses suggests that heterogeneous concerns for reputation and self-signaling across gender give rise to the contextual effects associated with the give and take frames that have previously been observed in the literature.     

The sustainability of the commons: giving and receiving

This paper analyzes the use of a cost-free reward mechanism in the exploitation of a common property resource. We implement an experimental study involving a two-stages game where agents first decide resource appropriation and then have the opportunity to distribute cost-free bestowals. We observe that subjects link the two activities in such a way that appropriation determines the distribution of bestowals which in turn contributes maintaining low appropriation levels, thus avoiding the destruction of the common resource. Not all the potential bestowals are distributed, however.     

The Great Recession and charitable giving

We examine the impact of the Great Recession on charitable giving. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate a variety of specifications and find sharp declines in overall donative behaviour that is not accounted for by shocks to income or wealth. These results suggest that overall attitudes towards giving changed over this time period.     

The inflation game

We study a game where households buy consumption goods to preempt inflation. This game features a unique equilibrium with high (low) inflation, whenever money supply is high (low). For intermediate levels of money supply, there exist multiple stable equilibria where inflation is either high or low. Equilibria with moderate inflation, however, do not exist, and can thus not be targeted by central banks. That is, depending on agents' equilibrium play, money supply is always either too high or too low for moderate inflation. Finally, we find that inflation rates of durable goods, such as houses, cars, luxury watches, or furniture, are useful leading indicators for changes in overall inflation.     

How giving affects giving: a long-term analysis of donations

Social preferences theories suggest that at least some people show altruistic behaviour. However, this philanthropic behaviour ranges from pure altruistic preferences to reluctant altruists. The fact that a subset of contributors has impure preferences raises questions regarding the stability of prosocial contributions. Assuming differences in other regarding preferences, we examine whether at an aggregated level monetary contributions are stable or fragile over time. We study the aggregated donations in the US from 1973 to 2013 using ARIMA and ARMAX models. The significant autoregressive and moving average coefficients in our estimations suggest that aggregated donations are highly autocorrelated. Our estimated impulse response functions indicate that aggregated donations converge to their historic mean quickly after an exogenous shock, which shows the stickiness of the inclination to donate.