More than thirty years of ultimatum bargaining experiments: Motives, variations, and a survey of the recent literature

Abstract

Take-it or leave-it offers are probably as old as mankind. Our objective here is, first, to provide a, probably subjectively-colored, recollection of the initial ultimatum game experiment, its motivation and the immediate responses. Second, we discuss important extensions of the standard ultimatum bargaining game in a unified framework, and, third, we offer a survey of the experimental ultimatum bargaining literature containing papers published since the turn of the century. The paper argues that the ultimatum game is an extremely versatile tool for research in bargaining and on social preferences. Finally, we provide examples for open research questions and directions for future studies.Keywords: ultimatum bargaining, experiment, social preferences. JEL classification: C91 This version: 21 August 2013* When Güth presented the more recent ultimatum-like experiments, Uri Gneezy suggested writing a survey of more than 30 years of ultimatum bargaining research. We thank him for the nudge and David Bauder as well as Niklas Garnadt for excellent research assistance. We are extremely grateful to the magnificent members of the Economic Science Association Discussion List; many of them -too many to mention each by namepointed us to scholarly papers that use the ultimatum game. All remaining errors and omissions are of course ours. §

Intention-Based Sharing

“…Whereas there is no treatment effect on response behavior in IG: acceptance thresholds in treatment T1 (2.454) and treatment T2 (2.176) do not significantly differ (see Table 2, WRST, p-value > 0.1). 22 The acceptance share in YN is close to 100%, in line with earlier YN-experiments (see Güth and Kocher [26]). …”

“…23,24 Looking at the three games separately, Table 3 shows that in IG being a proposer in the previous round (L.proposer) 25 has a positive effect on offers in the next round, implying that one is willing to offer more when having been endowed before, whereas this is not significant in UG. Past profits (L.Profit) 26 have a negative effect on offers in IG and YN: one becomes greedier after having earned more. Checking whether being an odd or even allocator candidate has an impact on offers reveals that when odd, there are more downward adjustments toward the minimum level, which for odd is still positive (and therefore seemingly more tolerable).…”

“…25 L.Proposer is a variable equal to 1 for those participants who are actual proposer in the previous round. 26 L.Profit is a variable which measure profits earned in the previous round. 27 Odd is a variable equal to 1 for the o−participants and equal to zero otherwise.…”

Testosterone administration does not affect men's rejections of low ultimatum game offers or aggressive mood

“…The ultimatum game is among the most widely used experimental paradigms on bargaining in humans (Güth et al, 1982;Güth and Kocher, 2014) and, more recently, in nonhuman primates (Jensen et al, 2007;Proctor et al, 2013). It involves two players deciding how to split a given monetary endowment.…”

“…However, a vast body of evidence indicates that human beings seldom behave in this way when playing the ultimatum game (Güth and Kocher, 2014). Instead, players often agree on an even split of the endowment.…”