Int J Game Theory (1998) 27:269±299 Dictator game giving: Rules of fairness versus acts of kindness Gary E. Bolton1, Elena Katok2, Rami Zwick3 1Department of Management Science and Information Systems, 303 Beam, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA (e-mail:
[email protected]) 2Department of Management Science and Information Systems, 303 Beam, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA (e-mail:
[email protected]) 3Department of Marketing, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China (e-mail:
[email protected]) Received August 1993/Final version April 1994 Abstract. In both dictator and impunity games, one player, the dictator, divides a ®xed amount of money between himself and one other, the recipient. Recent lab studies of these games have produced seemingly inconsistent results, re- porting substantially divergent amounts of dictator giving. Also, one prom- inent explanation for some of these di¨erences, the impact of experimenter observation, displayed weak explanatory power in a di¨erent but related lab game. Data from the new experiment reported here o¨ers some explanations. We ®nd that dictators determine how much they will give on the basis of the total money available for the entire experimental session, not on the basis of what is available per game. This explains the reported di¨erences between impunity and dictator studies. When distributing a gift among several recipi- ents, individual dictators show little tendency towards equal treatment. Also, we ®nd no evidence for the experimenter observation e¨ect. Comparison with earlier experiments suggests that di¨erences in the context of the game, a¨ected by di¨erences in written directions and independent of experimenter obser- vation, account for di¨erences across dictator studies.