Status Quo Effects in Fairness Games: Reciprocal Responses to Acts of Commission vs. Acts of Omission

James Cox, Maroš Servátka and Radovan Vadovic ()

Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: Both the law and culture make a central distinction between acts of commission that overturn the status quo and acts of omission that uphold it. In everyday life acts of commission often elicit stronger reciprocal responses than do acts of omission. In this paper we compare reciprocal responses to both types of acts and ask whether behavior of subjects in three experiments is consistent with existing theory. The design of the experiments focuses on the axioms of revealed altruism theory (Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj, 2008) that make it observationally distinct from other theories. We find support for this theory in all three experiments.

Keywords: Experimental economics; reciprocity; revealed altruism; acts of commission; acts of omission; other-regarding preferences; status quo (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74 pages
Date: 2013-08-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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https://repec.canterbury.ac.nz/cbt/econwp/1325.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Status Quo Effects in Fairness Games: Reciprocal Responses to Acts of Commission vs. Acts of Omission (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbt:econwp:13/25

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