Abstract
This paper addresses the role of affect and emotions in shaping the behavior of responders in the ultimatum game. A huge amount of research shows that players do not behave in an economically rational way in the ultimatum game, and emotional mechanisms have been proposed as a possible explanation. In particular, feelings of fairness, anger and envy are likely candidates as affective determinants. We introduce a three-player ultimatum game with three-options, which permits the responder to either penalize the proposer or to penalize a third party by rejecting offers. This allows for partially distinguishing rejections due to a retaliation motive driven by anger towards the proposer from rejections due to inequity aversion driven by feelings of envy towards a third party. Results from two experiments suggest that responders experience feelings of dissatisfaction and unfairness if their share is small in comparison to the proposer’s share; anger, then, may trigger rejections towards the proposer. Responders also experience dissatisfaction and envy when third party shares exceed their own shares; however, in contrast to anger, envy does not trigger rejections and is dissociated from the decision to accept or reject an offer. We conclude that acting upon anger is socially acceptable, whereas envy is not acceptable as a reason for action. Furthermore, we find that responders generally feel better after rejections, suggesting that rejections serve to regulate one’s affective state.
Highlights
Ample evidence shows that in strategic situations actual behavior is often inconsistent with optimal solutions according to standard rational choice theory [1,2,3,4]
A logistic regression analysis with acceptance as dependent binary variable, and responder and third party shares as independent variables, yielded significant effects for responder share (χ2(1) = 38.8, p < 0.001), and third party share (χ2(2) = 20.9, p < 0.001); the interaction just missed significance (χ2(2) = 5.9, p = 0.052). This pattern closely parallels the pattern in Study 1, except that acceptance rate increased across third party shares when the responder received only the minimum amount of
Perceived fairness increased with rises in responder share as well as in third party share, indicating that fairness is judged in a holistic way and not merely focused on the responder
Summary
Ample evidence shows that in strategic situations actual behavior is often inconsistent with optimal solutions according to standard rational choice theory [1,2,3,4]. In the well-known ultimatum game, players are willing to forego monetary gains in order to punish unfair behavior of others [4,5]. We assume that affect and emotions constitute proximal causes of behavior in such strategic games. Drawing on findings from behavioral and psychological research on strategic interactions [10,11,12,13,14], we aim to contribute to this line of research and to examine the role of affect in the ultimatum game from the perspective of the responder. We study the relative impact of two responder-related motivations assumed to be emotionally triggered: One is the propensity to reject in order to punish another person because of his or her malicious intentions, a second propensity is to reject due to a general aversion towards unequal payoffs among involved parties [15]. We further presume that in either case rejections serve to regulate the responder’s emotions, that is, to readjust to an emotionally acceptable state after having experienced an unpleasant offer [16]
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