5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining experiment. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and medium chosen for participation and (2) the external validity of student behaviour (inside and outside the lab). We find that older participants and women care more about equal distributions and that Internet users are more self-regarding than those using mail or fax. Decisions made by students in the lab are rather similar to those made by participants in the newspaper experiment, indicating a high degree of external validity of student data.Newspaper experiments have recently become popular, because they address a possibly large audience from the general public instead of the typical student subject pool. Due to the much broader audience, newspaper experiments provide a suitable tool for testing the often disputed external validity of usual laboratory experiments with student participants. Furthermore, newspaper experiments offer the chance to study the influence of socio-economic or demographic factors -which have very limited variation with student participants -on economic decision making. Since readers of prestigious newspapers -such as the Financial Times in which a newspaper experiment on the guessing game has been run (Thaler, 1997) -are often important decision makers in society, one may even observe the economic decision making of a special, and important, segment of a society.So far, newspaper experiments have been run almost exclusively on the guessing game (Nagel, 1995;Bosch-Domènech et al., 2002) for which fairness, distributional concerns or other social motives play no role. Since social motives are very important in many economic decisions -think of bargaining, charitable giving, political decisions on social welfare etc. -it is rather surprising that newspaper experiments have only very recently been run on other games than the guessing game. 1 In this article, we present the results of a newspaper experiment on a bargaining game, which was run in the German weekly, Die Zeit, in November 2001. A total of 5,132 individuals, ranging in age from 8 years to 96 years, participated via mail, fax or Internet. We can control for several characteristics of experimental participants and concentrate in our analysis of the data on these following research questions. First, how do socio-demographic variables like gender, age or education influence bargaining behaviour? Second, has the medium chosen for participation (mail, fax, Internet) an impact on bargaining behaviour? Third, and most important, is student behaviour (in * We thank Die Zeit for conducting the experiment and its readers for numerous comments. Leonardo Felli and three referees provided very constructive comments and advice on how to improve the article. Sutter acknowledges support from the Centre of Experimental Economics at the University of Innsbruck (sponsored by Raiffeisen-Landesbank Tirol).1 Cabrales and Nagel (2002) have used the platform of Spektrum der...

On 11 May 2001, readers of the Berliner Zeitung were invited to participate in an ultimatum bargaining experiment played in the strategy vector mode: each participant chooses not only how much (s)he demands of the DM1,000 pie but also which of the nine possible offers of DM100, 200, y , 900 (s)he would accept or reject. In addition, participants were asked to predict the most frequent type of behavior. Three randomly selected proposer-responder pairs were rewarded according to the rules of ultimatum bargaining and three randomly chosen participants of those who predicted the most frequent type of behavior received a prize of DM500. Decisions could be submitted by mail, fax or via the internet. Behavior is described, statistically analyzed and compared to the usual laboratory ultimatum bargaining results.JEL classification: C93.

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