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Fairness and bargaining power in threshold public goods experiments
Author(s) -
Hsu LiChen
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.578
Subject(s) - dictator , dictator game , bargaining power , power (physics) , microeconomics , economics , public good , trace (psycholinguistics) , public goods game , bargaining problem , mathematical economics , social psychology , psychology , political science , law , politics , physics , quantum mechanics , linguistics , philosophy
Experiments on three two‐person threshold public good provision games, namely, the simultaneous, sequential, and dictator games, are conducted to explore the motives behind giving. Players who move simultaneously are endowed with equal bargaining power, and players who move first are endowed with more bargaining power than players who move subsequently. Dictators are indubitably endowed with complete bargaining power. Since the differences between the bargaining powers of two players increase from the simultaneous to the sequential to the dictator game, comparisons among games allow us to trace whether the contribution behavior is motivated by fairness or is simply due to the strategic concern. The experimental evidence shows that the strategic concern explains the overall contribution behavior better than the motive of fairness. However, in the final round 26% of the dictators share the threshold evenly with their opponents, suggesting that some subjects do play fairly. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.