Bargaining under surveillance: Evidence from a three-person ultimatum game

Lauri Sääksvuori and Abhijit Ramalingam

No 15-01, 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: This paper examines how third-party surveillance influences preferences over distributional outcomes. In addition, we examine what motivates people to invest economic resources to monitor decision-making processes. Our results show that a large majority of individuals is willing to pay for a right to monitor decision-making processes over distributional outcomes despite pecuniary incentives to the contrary. We find that electronic third-party surveillance does not affect distributional outcomes in a three-person ultimatum game. Finally, we find that third- parties are the most over-optimistic about their own outcomes when they have a chance to signal their presence to the negotiators. Our results suggest that people may overestimate the impact of transparent decision-making on economic outcomes.

Keywords: bargaining; communication; distributional preferences; experiment; negotiations; surveillance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D01 D03 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/cbess/UEA-CBESS-15-01.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bargaining under surveillance: Evidence from a three-person ultimatum game (2015)
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:uea:wcbess:15-01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Reception, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 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. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cara Liggins ().