A note on reciprocity and modified dictator games

Handbook on the Economics of Reciprocity and Social Enterprise, 2013

This note paper has been prepared for inclusion as a book chapter in a forthcoming Handbook on the Economics of Philanthropy, Reciprocity and Social Enterprise edited by Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni and to be published by Edward Elgar.

Games and Economic Behavior, 1996

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.

International Journal of Game Theory, 1998

In both dictator and impunity games, one player, the dictator, divides a ®xed amount of money between himself and one other, the recipient. Recent lab studies of these games have produced seemingly inconsistent results, reporting substantially divergent amounts of dictator giving. Also, one prominent explanation for some of these di¨erences, the impact of experimenter observation, displayed weak explanatory power in a di¨erent but related lab game. Data from the new experiment reported here o¨ers some explanations. We ®nd that dictators determine how much they will give on the basis of the total money available for the entire experimental session, not on the basis of what is available per game. This explains the reported di¨erences between impunity and dictator studies. When distributing a gift among several recipients, individual dictators show little tendency towards equal treatment. Also, we ®nd no evidence for the experimenter observation e¨ect. Comparison with earlier experiments suggests that di¨erences in the context of the game, a¨ected by di¨erences in written directions and independent of experimenter observation, account for di¨erences across dictator studies. We propose a hypothetical decision procedure, based on the notion that dictator giving originates with personal and social rules that e¨ectively constrain self-interested behavior. The procedure provides a link between dictator behavior and a broader class of laboratory phenomena.

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 2018

This article attempts to explain the behaviour observed in the dictator game without explicitly assuming a utility function. Alternatively, I consider the repre- sentative behaviour of a society composed of heterogeneous individuals in terms of altruism and self-interest. Based on these two principles, I present an allocation that aggregates the society's preferences. The result depends crucially on the value of the resource under dispute for the dictator. Even if the value of the resource is extremely important for the dictator, the dictator cannot justify a share of the resource larger than 3/4 of the total. An allocation proposing more than this share of the resource cannot reach social consensus. On the other extreme, if the value of the resource is sufficiently unimportant for the society, an equal split of the resource emerges in the limit.

Journal of Public Economics, 2013

We design an experiment to test whether incomplete crowding out in dictator games can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic preferences. By giving the recipients an endowment of varying levels, we create an environment in which crowding out may occur. We find that the behavior of 66 percent of the dictators can be rationalized by the impurely altruistic utility function.

2008

Social norms of “fairness” have been said to cause the observed deviations from non-cooperative game theoretic predictions in ultimatum and dictator games. But where do social norms and concepts of “fairness” come from?

2021

Offers in the Dictator game are considered altruistic behavior. Indicators of the need of the receiver like income or a specific request of the receiver influence proposers’ decisions, along with traits such as greed and altruism. We investigated the combination of these influences in 140 participants. A higher need by the receiver led to higher offers up to equal share demands unless reactance led to lower offers for high-income receivers. Correspondingly, low-income receivers got more money than other receivers if asking for little. Trait altruism led to higher offers, while trait greed led to lower offers in above equal share requests. We found exploratory unusually high offers in our paradigm, lower offers for women and for requests in general. The present findings strengthen the concept of a “benevolent” non-harming for anyone nature of narrow altruism, while supporting the concept of greed including the possibility of getting more at the expense of others. Additionally, the ro...

Experimental Economics, 2012

We investigate the external validity of giving in the dictator game by using the misdirected letter technique in a within-subject design. First, subjects participated in standard dictator games (double blind) conducted in labs in two different studies. Second, after four to five weeks (study 1) or two years (study 2), we delivered prepared letters to the same subjects. The envelopes and the contents of the letters were designed to create the impression that they were misdirected by the mail delivery service. The letters contained 10 Euros (20 Swiss Francs in study 2) corresponding to the endowment of the in-lab experiments. We observe in both studies that subjects who showed other-regarding behavior in the lab returned the misdirected letters more often than subjects giving nothing, suggesting that in-lab behavior is related to behavior in the field. Keywords Other-regarding preferences • Fairness • Dictator game • Behavioral game theory • External validity • Misdirected letter technique • Field experiment JEL Classification C91 • C93 • D03 • D63 • D64 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

Indian economic review, 2021

We conduct an experiment using sequential dictator games where two dictators give serially to a common recipient. In the treatment conditions, the second dictator knows the outcome in the first game and thus the endowment of the recipient. Across treatment conditions, we alter the mechanism that determines the recipient’s endowment by replacing the first game dictator by a disinterested third party or a computer. We find that a negative relationship exists between the endowment of the recipient and giving of the second dictator only when a human with self-interest performs the allocation in the first game. Additionally, we find some evidence that dictators in the second game give less than first game dictators and no significant difference in average second game dictator giving across conditions.