Dictator game

The dictator game is a popular experimental instrument in social psychology and economics, a derivative of the ultimatum game. The term 'game' is a misnomer because it captures a decision by a single player: to send money to another or not. The results – most players choose to send money – evidence the role of fairness and norms in economic behavior, and undermine the assumption of narrow self-interest. The dictator game is a popular experimental instrument in social psychology and economics, a derivative of the ultimatum game. The term 'game' is a misnomer because it captures a decision by a single player: to send money to another or not. The results – most players choose to send money – evidence the role of fairness and norms in economic behavior, and undermine the assumption of narrow self-interest. In the dictator game, the first player, 'the dictator', determines how to split an endowment (such as a cash prize) between himself and the second player. The dictator’s action space is complete and therefore is at his own will to determine the endowment, which means that the recipient has no influence over the outcome of the game. While the initial game as developed by Daniel Kahneman involved third-party punishment, successors later simplified the ultimatum game to remove the punishment portion, resulting in the form now known as the dictator game. Based on homo economicus principle, one would expect players to maximize their own payoff; however, it has been shown that human populations are more “benevolent than homo economicus” and therefore rarely do the majority give nothing to the recipient. In 1988 a group of researchers at the University of Iowa conducted a controlled experiment to evaluate the homo economicus model of behavior with groups of voluntarily recruited economics, accounting, and business students. These experimental results contradict the homo economicus model, suggesting that players in the dictator role take fairness and potential adverse consequences into account when making decisions about how much utility to give the recipient. A later study in neuroscience further challenged the homo economicus model, suggesting that various cognitive differences among humans affect decision-making processes, and thus ideas of fairness. Experimental results have indicated that adults often allocate money to the recipients, reducing the amount of money the dictator receives. These results appear robust: for example, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross-cultural study that dictators do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the recipient. In modified versions of the dictator game, children also tend to allocate some of a resource to a recipient and most five-year-olds share at least half of their goods. A number of studies have examined psychological framing of the dictator game with a version called 'taking' in which the player 'takes' resources from the recipient's predetermined endowment, rather than choosing the amount to 'give'. Some studies show no effect between male and female players, but one 2017 study reported a difference between male and female players in the taking frame. In 2016, Bhogal et. al. conducted a study to evaluate the effects of perceived attractiveness on decision-making behavior and altruism in the standard dictator game, testing theories that altruism may serve as a courtship display. This study found no relationship between attractiveness and altruism.