The Sharing Game: Fairness in resource allocation as a function of incentive, gender, and recipient types
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2007, Vol 2, Issue 3
Abstract
Economic games involving allocation of resources have been a useful tool for the study of decision making for both psychologists and economists. In two experiments involving a repeated-trials game over twenty opportunities, undergraduates made choices to distribute resources between themselves and an unseen, passive other either optimally (for themselves) but non-competitively, equally but non-optimally, or least optimally but competitively. Surprisingly, whether participants were told that the anonymous other was another student or a computer did not matter. Using such terms as "game" and "player" in the course of the session was associated with an increased frequency of competitive behavior. Males were more optimal than females: a gender-by-incentive interaction was found in the first experiment. In agreement with prior research, participants whose resources were backed by monetary incentive acted the most optimally. Overall, equality was the modal strategy employed, although it is clear that motivational context affects the allocation of resources.
Authors and Affiliations
Arthur Kennelly and Edmund Fantino
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677579
- DOI -
- Views 170
- Downloads 0
The Short Maximization Inventory
We developed the Short Maximization Inventory (SMI) by shortening the Maximization Inventory (Turner, Rim, Betz & Nygren, 2012) from 34 items to 15 items. Using the Item Response Theory framework, we identified and remov...
Spontaneous associations and label framing have similar effects in the public goods game
It is known that presentation of a meaningful label (e.g., "The Teamwork Game") can influence decisions in economic games. A common view is that such labels cue associations to preexisting mental models of situations, a...
Testing the effect of time pressure on asymmetric dominance and compromise decoys in choice
Dynamic, connectionist models of decision making, such as decision field theory (Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001), propose that the effect of context on choice arises from a series of pairwise comparisons between attrib...
How comparing decision outcomes affects subsequent decisions: The carry-over of a comparative mind-set
In the current paper we investigate how feedback over decision outcomes may affect future decisions. In an experimental study we demonstrate that if people receive feedback over the outcomes they obtained (“factual outco...
Causal explanations affect judgments of the need for psychological treatment
Knowing what event precipitated a client’s abnormal behaviors makes the client appear more normal than if the event is not known (Meehl, 1973). Does such knowledge also influence judgments of the need for psychological t...