“Anything Goes” in an Ultimatum Game?

Peter Paul Vanderschraaf ()
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Peter Paul Vanderschraaf: Department of Political Economy & Moral Science, University of Arizona, Social Sciences 213, 1145 E. South Campus Drive, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

Games, 2025, vol. 16, issue 4, 1-33

Abstract: I consider an underexplored possible explainer of the “surprising” results of Ultimatum Game experiments, namely, that Proposers and Recipients consider following only some of all the logically possible strategies of their Ultimatum Game. I present an evolutionary analysis of different games having the same set of allowable Proposer offers and functions that determine Proposer and Recipient payoffs. For Unrestricted Ultimatum Games , where Recipients may choose from among any of the logically possible pure strategies, populations tend to evolve most often to Nash equilibria where Proposers make the lowest allowable offer. However, for Threshold Reduced Ultimatum Games , where Recipients must choose from among minimum acceptable offer strategies, and for Range Reduced Ultimatum Games , where Recipients must choose from among pure strategies that spurn offers that are “too high” as well as “too low”, populations tend to evolve most often to Nash equilibria where Proposers offer substantially more than the lowest possible offer, a result that is consistent with existing Ultimatum Game experimental results. Finally, I argue that, practically speaking, actual Proposers and Recipients will likely regard some reduction of the Unrestricted Ultimatum Game as their game because, for them, the strategies of this reduction are salient.

Keywords: Unrestricted Ultimatum Game; Threshold Reduced Ultimatum Game; Range Reduced Ultimatum Game; acceptance set; strategy salience; threshold strategy; range strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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