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Exploring the Effects of Working for Endowments on Behaviour in Standard Economic Games

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  • Freya Harrison
  • Claire El Mouden

Abstract

In recent years, significant advances have been made in understanding the adaptive (ultimate) and mechanistic (proximate) explanations for the evolution and maintenance of cooperation. Studies of cooperative behaviour in humans invariably use economic games. These games have provided important insights into the mechanisms that maintain economic and social cooperation in our species. However, they usually rely on the division of monetary tokens which are given to participants by the investigator. The extent to which behaviour in such games may reflect behaviour in the real world of biological markets – where money must be earned and behavioural strategies incur real costs and benefits – is unclear. To provide new data on the potential scale of this problem, we investigated whether people behaved differently in two standard economic games (public goods game and dictator game) when they had to earn their monetary endowments through the completion of dull or physically demanding tasks, as compared with simply being given the endowment. The requirement for endowments to be ‘earned’ through labour did not affect behaviour in the dictator game. However, the requirement to complete a dull task reduced cooperation in the public goods game among the subset of participants who were not familiar with game theory. There has been some effort to test whether the conclusions drawn from standard, token-based cooperation games adequately reflect cooperative behaviour ‘in the wild.’ However, given the almost total reliance on such games to study cooperation, more exploration of this issue would be welcome. Our data are not unduly worrying, but they do suggest that further exploration is needed if we are to make general inferences about human behaviour from the results of structured economic games.

Suggested Citation

  • Freya Harrison & Claire El Mouden, 2011. "Exploring the Effects of Working for Endowments on Behaviour in Standard Economic Games," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(11), pages 1-6, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0027623
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027623
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    2. Benoit Bediou & Klaus R Scherer, 2014. "Egocentric Fairness Perception: Emotional Reactions and Individual Differences in Overt Responses," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(2), pages 1-11, February.
    3. Feltovich, Nick, 2019. "Is earned bargaining power more fully exploited?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 152-180.
    4. Catola Marco & Guarnieri Pietro & Marcon Laura & Spadoni Lorenzo, 2024. "Real-effort in the Multilevel Public Goods Game," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 24(3), pages 965-974.
    5. Larney, Andrea & Rotella, Amanda & Barclay, Pat, 2019. "Stake size effects in ultimatum game and dictator game offers: A meta-analysis," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 61-72.
    6. Tobias Schütze & Philipp C. Wichardt & Philipp Christoph Wichardt, 2023. "A Real Effort vs. Standard Public Goods Experiment: Overall More All-or-Nothing, Lower Average Contributions and Men Become More Selfish in the Effort-Loss Frame," CESifo Working Paper Series 10444, CESifo.
    7. Chapkovski, Philipp & Kujansuu, Essi, 2019. "Real-time interactions in oTree using Django Channels: Auctions and real effort tasks," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 114-123.

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