The Impact of Exchange Context on the Activation of Equity in Ultimatum Games

Elizabeth Hoffman, Kevin McCabe and Vernon Smith ()

Experimental Economics, 2000, vol. 3, issue 1, 5-9

Abstract: In this paper we report the results of additional exchange ultimatum game experiments conducted at the same time as the exchange ultimatum game experiments reported in Hoffman et al. (Games and Economic Behavior, 7(3), pp. 346–380, 1994). In these additional experiments, we use instructions to change an impersonal exchange situation to a personal exchange situation. To do this, we prompt sellers to consider what choices their buyers will make. Game theory would predict that thinking about the situation would lead sellers to make smaller offers to buyers. In contrast, we find a significant increase in seller offers to buyers. This result suggests that encouraging sellers to thinking about buyer choices focuses their attention on the strategic interaction with humans who think they way they do in personal exchange situations, and who may punish them for unacceptable behavior, and not on the logic of the game theoretic structure of the problem. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: ultimatum games; equity theory; experimental methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1009925123187 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:expeco:v:3:y:2000:i:1:p:5-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1009925123187

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().