The Stability of Social Norms: Anonymity in Dictator and Ultimatum Games

• In Event: 350 - Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Paper Session. Open Topic on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity

Abstract

In the last two decades results from a wide array of fairness experiments have provided considerable evidence for altruistic and fair behavior of subjects. In dictator games subjects give on average 28 percent of their endowment to co-players. The narrow assumptions of homo economicus stand in sharp contrast to these findings and lead to the impression that adaptations of the theory are required. But recently these results were challenged by other findings that show a tremendous instability of prosocial behavior. Especially the devastating effect of anonymity on fairness behavior imposes critical questions whether the underlying motivations of subjects are truly other-regarding. In the following, we first will have a look at results from dictator games under different conditions of anonymity. Our results suggest that individuals closely follow egoistic motives in the dictator game when anonymity is convincingly implemented. Thus, fairness depends on a signaling motive. These results lead to a further study where the robustness of altruistic punishment is tested in an ultimatum game. Here, altruistic punishment is stable under different conditions of anonymity. We suggest that subjects apply costly behavior in anonymous ultimatum game situations because of emotional reasons and not due to signaling motives.

Authors

• Sonja Pointner, Ludwig Maximilian University-Munich

• Axel Franzen, University of Bern