No Switchbacks: Rethinking Aspiration-Based Dynamics in the Ultimatum Game

Jeffrey Carpenter and Peter Matthews

Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics

Abstract: Aspiration-based evolutionary dynamics have recently been used to model the evolution of fair play in the ultimatum game showing that incredible threats to reject low offers persist in equilibrium. We focus on two extensions of this analysis: we experimentally test whether assumptions about agent motivations (aspiration levels) and the structure of the game (binary strategy space) reflect actual play, and we examine the problematic assumption embedded in the standard replicator dynamic that unhappy agents who switch strategies may return to a rejected strategy without exploring other options. We find that the resulting "no switchback" dynamic predicts the evolution of play better than the standard dynamic and that aspirations are a significant motivator for our participants. In the process, we also construct and analyze a variant of the ultimatum game in which players can adopt conditional (on their induced aspirations) stategies.

Keywords: ultimatum game; learning; aspirations; replicator dynamics; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2003-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-gth and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.middlebury.edu/services/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0218R.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: No Switchbacks: Rethinking Aspiration-Based Dynamics in the Ultimatum Game (2005)
Working Paper: No Switchbacks: Rethinking Aspiration-Based Dynamics in the Ultimatum Game (2002)
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:mdl:mdlpap:0218r

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vijaya Wunnava ().