Do Participants and Observers Assess Intentions Differently During Bargaining and Conflict?

Eric Dickson ()
Additional contact information
Eric Dickson: Department of Politics, New York University

No 23, Working Papers from New York University, Center for Experimental Social Science

Abstract: Political actors in settings of bargaining and conflict often find themselves uncertain about the motives of their counterparts. This paper explores the psychology of motive assessment using a novel experimental design involving imperfect-information versions of the ultimatum and dictator bargaining games. Subjects are randomly assigned to one of three roles { the traditional proposer and recipient roles in these games, and a novel impartial observer role. Recipients and observers are given identical, but ambiguous, information about proposers' offers, and make post-play assessments of proposers' intentions that are rewarded based on accuracy. When uncertainty is sufficiently high, recipients' assessments of proposers' intentions are significantly lower than observers' assessments in the ultimatum game, in stark contrast to Bayesian predictions, but there is no evidence of any difference in the dictator game. The results suggest that individuals' perceptions can be directly affected by the set of strategic alternatives they possess, independent of access to information. One interpretation is that the power to accept or reject may prime individuals to be more critical or negative in forming assessments than they otherwise would be. If correct, this interpretation has important implications for theories of bargaining and con?ict, and for the design of institutions for conflict resolution.

Keywords: Role-dependent Beliefs; Imperfect Information; Ultimatum Game; Dictator Game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 D81 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cess.nyu.edu/0017:2007-01.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to cess.nyu.edu:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

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:cso:wpaper:0023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from New York University, Center for Experimental Social Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Ting ().