Dictator game giving: Rules of fairness versus acts of kindness

Abstract

In both dictator and impunity games, one player, the dictator, divides a fixed amount of money between himself and one other, the recipient. Recent lab studies of these games have produced seemingly inconsistent results, re- porting substantially divergent amounts of dictator giving. Also, one prom- inent explanation for some of these dierences, the impact of experimenter observation, displayed weak explanatory power in a dierent but related lab game. Data from the new experiment reported here oers some explanations. We find that dictators determine how much they will give on the basis of the total money available for the entire experimental session, not on the basis of what is available per game. This explains the reported dierences between impunity and dictator studies. When distributing a gift among several recipi- ents, individual dictators show little tendency towards equal treatment. Also, we find no evidence for the experimenter observation eect. Comparison with earlier experiments suggests that dierences in the context of the game, aected by dierences in written directions and independent of experimenter obser- vation, account for dierences across dictator studies. We propose a hypo- thetical decision procedure, based on the notion that dictator giving originates with personal and social rules that eectively constrain self-interested behavior. The procedure provides a link between dictator behavior and a broader class of laboratory phenomena.