Do women behave more reciprocally than men? Gender differences in real effort dictator games

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe analyze dictator allocation decisions in an experiment where the recipients have to earn the pot to be divided with a real-eort task. As the recipients move before the dictators, their eort decisions resemble the rst move in a trust game.Depending on the recipients' performance, the size of the pot is either high or low.We compare this real-eort treatment to a baseline treatment where the pot is a windfall gain and where a lottery determines the pot size. In the baseline treatment, reciprocity cannot play a role. We nd that female dictators show reciprocity and decrease their taking-rates signicantly in the real-eort treatment. This treatment eect is larger when female dictators make a decision on recipients who successfully generated a large pot compared to the case where the recipients performed poorly.By contrast, there is no treatment eect with male dictators, who generally exhibit more selsh behavior. JEL Classication numbers: C72, C91.

Physical Attractiveness and Altruism in Two Modified Dictator Games

“…There appears to be a difference between equity (reward should correlate with effort) and equality (everyone should get an equal stake). Research does support the notion of equity in dictator game research, where dictators offer more to those they believe deserve the endowment (Eckel & Grossman, 1996;Heinz et al, 2012). In addition, Oxoby and Spraggon (2008) conducted a study in which dictators and recipients earned their endowment by taking part in an exam.…”

“…Many theorists have adopted behavioral game-theoretic models to unpack, and quantify altruism, fairness, and cooperation (see Camerer, 2003). The dictator game has been used extensively to measure altruism toward non-kin in the laboratory (e.g., Heinz, Juranek, & Rau, 2012;Hoffman, McCabe, & Smith, 1996b). Game theory has proved useful in explaining how behavior has evolved in humans, suggesting economic strategy can assist in explaining evolved adaptations (Maynard, 1982).…”

Sex Differences in Trust and Trustworthiness - A Meta-Analysis of the Trust Game and the Gift-Exchange Game

“…Besides the trust game and the gift-exchange game there are other economic games that measure trust and/or trustworthiness, but they have not been used frequently enough to attempt a meta-analysis. Examples of such games are the real-effort dictator game (Heinz, Juranek, & Rau, 2012) and the moonlighting game (Abbink, Irlenbusch, & Renner, 2000).…”

A neural signature of fairness in altruism: A game of theta?

“…Depending on the setting of the dictator game, gender also takes influence in the offering (Eckel & Grossman, 1998), for example, women being less selfish if altruistic actions are costly while men are more altruistic than women if the costs for altruism are low (Andreoni & Vesterlund, 2001). In addition, women are more altruistic in the role of proposers in a real-effort task (Heinz, Juranek, & Rau, 2012). Further, it has been shown that humans may want to present themselves not as completely selfish and may thus still follow the pressure of social norms in the dictator game, which increases offers (Cappelen, Nielsen, Sørensen, Tungodden, & Tyran, 2013).…”