Minimally acceptable altruism and the ultimatum game

Julio Rotemberg

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2008, vol. 66, issue 3-4, 457-476

Abstract: I suppose that people react with anger when others show themselves not to be minimally altruistic. With heterogeneous agents, this can account for the experimental results of ultimatum and dictator games. Moreover, it can account for the surprisingly large fraction of individuals who offer an even split with parameter values that are more plausible than those that are required to explain outcomes in these experiments with the models of Levine [Levine, D.K., 1998. Modeling altruism and spitefulness in experiments. Review of Economic Dynamics 1, 593-622], Fehr and Schmidt [Fehr, E., Schmidt, K.M., 1999. A theory of fairness, competition and cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, 817-868], Dickinson [Dickinson, D.L., 2000. Ultimatum decision making: a test of reciprocal kindness. Theory and Decision 48, 151-177] and Bolton and Ockenfels [Bolton, G.E., Ockenfels, A., 2000. ERC: a theory of equity, reciprocity, and competition. American Economic Review 90, 166-193].

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-2681(07)00019-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Minimally acceptable altruism and the ultimatum game (2006)
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:eee:jeborg:v:66:y:2008:i:3-4:p:457-476

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().