EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fair and unfair punishers coexist in the Ultimatum Game

Pablo Brañas-Garza, Antonio Espín and Benedikt Herrmann
Additional contact information
Benedikt Herrmann: Behavioural Economics Team, Institute for Health and Consumer Protection, Joint Research Centre, European Commission

No 2014-02, SEET Working Papers from BELIS, Istanbul Bilgi University

Abstract: Fairness norms are crucial in understanding the emergence and enforcement of large-scale cooperation in human societies. The most widely applied framework in the study of human fairness is the Ultimatum Game (UG). In the UG, a proposer suggests how to split a sum of money with a responder. If the responder rejects the proposer’s offer, both players get nothing. Rejection of unfair offers is considered to be a form of punishment implemented by fair-minded individuals, who are willing to sacrifice their own resources in order to impose the fairness norm. However, an alternative interpretation is equally plausible: punishers might actually be using rejections in a competitive, spiteful fashion as a means to increase their relative standing. This hypothesis is in line with recent evidence demonstrating that “prosocial” and “antisocial” punishers coexist in other experimental games. Using two large-scale experiments, we explore the nature of UG punishers by analyzing their behavior in a Dictator Game. In both studies, we confirm the coexistence of two entirely different sub-populations: prosocial punishers, who behave fairly as dictators, and spiteful (antisocial) punishers, who are totally unfair. Such a result is fundamental for research on the foundations of punishment behavior employing the UG. We discuss how focusing only on the fairness-oriented part of human behavior might give rise to misleading conclusions regarding the evolution of cooperation and the behavioral underpinnings of stable social systems.

Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repeck.bilgi.org.tr/RePEc/beb/wpseet/BelisWP_SEET02.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

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:beb:wpseet:201402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SEET Working Papers from BELIS, Istanbul Bilgi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fatih Mehmet Senyurt (belis@bilgi.edu.tr this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:beb:wpseet:201402