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Former CREA Working Papers |
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Working Papers # 406 | | Title: | The Role of Role Uncertainty in Modified Dictator Games | | Authors: | by Nagore Iriberri, Pedro Rey-Biel | | Date: | 07-07-2009 | | Keywords: | role uncertainty, role reversal, interdependent preferences, social welfare maximizing, inequity aversion, mixture-of-types models, strategy method, experiments | | JEL Codes: | C72; C91; D81 | | Abstract: | | We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are most frequent under role uncertainty (64%), selfish actions become most frequent without role uncertainty (69%). Also, the frequency of surplus destroying choices is negligible with role uncertainty (1%) but not so without it (11%). A classification of subjects into four different types of interdependent preferences (Selfish, Social Welfare maximizing, Inequity Averse and Competitive) shows that the use of role uncertainty overestimates the prevalence of Social Welfare maximizing preferences in the subject population (from 74% with role uncertainty to
21% without it) and underestimates Selfish and Inequity Averse preferences. Our results warn
against the use of role uncertainty in experiments that aim to measure the prevalence of interdependent preferences. | | Download this paper in a PDF file (144.71 Kb) |  Back to the list |
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