Economic Rationality in the Ultimatum Game

Ekonomická racionalita ve hře Ultimatum

Jan Fiala, Oldřich Starý, Helena Fialová, Adéla Holasová and Martina Fialová

Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, 2017, vol. 2017, issue 1, 64-78

Abstract: Rigorous application of experimental methodology to the interdisciplinary research of economic decision making is the main purpose of our work. In this paper, we introduce the main decision-making theories and outline economic rationality. We explain why we find it useful to discriminate between the "irrational" and "non-rational" components of decision making. We offer an oriented interdisciplinary point of view on economic rationality. In the applied section, we describe the main features of the Ultimatum game and summarize the up-to-date theories explaining the non-rational course of the game. We discuss in detail the reported relations between the nominal value of the stakes and the distribution of the offers and responses. We introduce the blinded, randomized Ultimatum game experiment that we conducted in our laboratory. We stress the importance of anonymity of the study subjects and the difference in salience of a factual reward against a hypothetical reward. We present the results of our study, showing that a duly chosen non-monetary reward, directly inconvertible into money, leads to a different offer distribution in the Ultimatum game without the necessity to invest excessive sums of money in the rewards. We compare our results to research published by other authors. According to our theory, the rational, non-rational and irrational components contribute to the decision making in Ultimatum differently depending on the different reward stakes.

Keywords: ultimatum game; rational decision making; value; expected utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C9 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://aop.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.aop.569.html (text/html)
http://aop.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.aop.569.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

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:prg:jnlaop:v:2017:y:2017:i:1:id:569:p:64-78

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Redakce Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, Vysoká škola ekonomická v Praze, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3
http://aop.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.aop.569

Access Statistics for this article

Acta Oeconomica Pragensia is currently edited by Klára Šimůnková

More articles in Acta Oeconomica Pragensia from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().