Expressing Emotion and Fairness Crowding-out in an Ultimatum Game with Incomplete Information

Josie I Chen () and Kenju Kamei

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Recent experimental research has shown that when rating systems are available, buyers are more generous in accepting unfair offers made by sellers. It has also shown that sellers make fairer decisions when they are rated, while some studies show that they are little affected by the rating systems. These studies are conducted under complete information settings. However, asymmetric information about the values of traded commodities between sellers and buyers may change their perception of fairness and thus may change sellers’ decisions. We conduct ultimatum game experiments in which only the sellers are informed of the size of pies. We find that when rating systems are available to the buyers, the buyers become more amenable to potentially unfair offers. We also find that sellers attempt to sell the commodity at higher prices, taking advantage of the buyers’ openness to potentially unfair offers, contrary to the past studies with complete information.

Keywords: Experiments; Ultimatum Game; Incomplete Information; Emotion; Rating; Social Approval; Social Disapproval (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D82 M21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/54405/1/MPRA_paper_54405.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:54405

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().