Unstructured Bargaining over an Endogenously Produced Surplus and Fairness Ideals: An Experiment

Wolfgang Luhan, Odile Poulsen and Michael Roos ()

No 13-10, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: Fairness considerations are important determinants of behavior in unstructured bargaining situations with equal bargaining power. If the surplus over which the bargaining takes place was created by separate, individual efforts, several entitlement-related fairness ideals might be relevant. In our experiment we first elicit subjects' fairness ideals using a questionnaire. In the following production phase each player generates output by luck, individual effort and talent. We analyze whether the elicited fairness ideals guide subjects' behavior in the subsequent bargaining in which the joint output is distributed among to individuals. We find that bargaining claims deviate significantly from the elicited fairness ideals and are strongly related to performance if one individual had produced more than the partner. These findings contrast the previous literature on fairness ideals, but enrich the findings on self-serving fairness.

Keywords: fairness; unstructured bargaining; self-serving fairness; opportunism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D39 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Working Paper: Unstructured Bargaining over an Endogenously Produced Surplus and Fairness Ideals – An Experiment (2013)
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