Reprocity and Uncertainty: When Do People Forgive?

Andres Gago

Working Papers from CEMFI

Abstract: A sizable proportion of individuals act reciprocally. They punish and reward depending on the (un)kindness of those with whom they interact. In this paper, I explore whether individuals still reciprocate intentions when others lack full control over the consequences of their actions. By means of a dictator game with punishment opportunities, I show that unkind intentions are enough to trigger punishments, irrespectively of the outcome. By contrast, accidents are forgiven. To isolate how uncertainty over the result of an action affects the assessment of intentions, I control for other possible departures from self-profit maximization, such as distributional concerns or efficiency maximization. I find that the former also plays a role in respondents’ behavior.

Keywords: Reciprocity, uncertaint,; blame, intentions, dictator, punishment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C79 C91 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
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:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemfi.es/ftp/wp/2024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Reciprocity and uncertainty: When do people forgive? (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2020_2024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CEMFI Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Araceli Requerey ().