IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0108218.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Heartbeat and Economic Decisions: Observing Mental Stress among Proposers and Responders in the Ultimatum Bargaining Game

Author

Listed:
  • Uwe Dulleck
  • Markus Schaffner
  • Benno Torgler

Abstract

The ultimatum bargaining game (UBG), a widely used method in experimental economics, clearly demonstrates that motives other than pure monetary reward play a role in human economic decision making. In this study, we explore the behaviour and physiological reactions of both responders and proposers in an ultimatum bargaining game using heart rate variability (HRV), a small and nonintrusive technology that allows observation of both sides of an interaction in a normal experimental economics laboratory environment. We find that low offers by a proposer cause signs of mental stress in both the proposer and the responder; that is, both exhibit high ratios of low to high frequency activity in the HRV spectrum.

Suggested Citation

  • Uwe Dulleck & Markus Schaffner & Benno Torgler, 2014. "Heartbeat and Economic Decisions: Observing Mental Stress among Proposers and Responders in the Ultimatum Bargaining Game," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(9), pages 1-9, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0108218
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108218
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108218
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108218&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0108218?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ernst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt, 1999. "A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 817-868.
    2. Brandts, Jordi & Garofalo, Orsola, 2012. "Gender pairings and accountability effects," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 31-41.
    3. David F. Hendry & Hans-Martin Krolzig, 2005. "The Properties of Automatic "GETS" Modelling," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 115(502), pages 32-61, March.
    4. repec:qut:qubewp:001 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Axel Ockenfels & Gary E. Bolton, 2000. "ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 166-193, March.
    6. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    7. Dirk Engelmann & Martin Strobel, 2004. "Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(4), pages 857-869, September.
    8. Falk, Armin & Menrath, Ingo & Verde, Pablo Emilio & Siegrist, Johannes, 2011. "Cardiovascular Consequences of Unfair Pay," IZA Discussion Papers 5720, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Pillutla, Madan M. & Murnighan, J. Keith, 1996. "Unfairness, Anger, and Spite: Emotional Rejections of Ultimatum Offers," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 208-224, December.
    10. Guth, Werner & Schmittberger, Rolf & Schwarze, Bernd, 1982. "An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 367-388, December.
    11. Erte Xiao & Daniel Houser, 2005. "Emotion expression in human punishment behavior," Experimental 0504003, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 18 May 2005.
    12. Dulleck, Uwe & Fooken, Jonas & Newton, Cameron & Ristl, Andrea & Schaffner, Markus & Torgler, Benno, 2016. "Tax compliance and psychic costs: Behavioral experimental evidence using a physiological marker," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 9-18.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Buckert, Magdalena & Oechssler, Jörg & Schwieren, Christiane, 2017. "Imitation under stress," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 252-266.
    2. Benno Torgler, 2014. "Can Tax Compliance Research Profit from Biology?," CREMA Working Paper Series 2014-08, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    3. Benno Torgler, 2014. "Can Tax Compliance Research Profit from Biology?," QuBE Working Papers 025, QUT Business School.
    4. Perakakis, Pandelis & Guinot-Saporta, José & Jaber-Lopez, Tarek & García-Gallego, Aurora & Georgantzis, Nikolaos, 2019. "A technical note on the precise timing of behavioral events in economic experiments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 10-14.
    5. Borawska Anna, 2017. "Cognitive Neuroscience Tools in Economic Experiments Investigating the Decision Making Process," Folia Oeconomica Stetinensia, Sciendo, vol. 17(1), pages 159-169, June.
    6. Ho Fai Chan & Uwe Dulleck & Benno Torgler, 2019. "Response Times and Tax Compliance," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-13, November.
    7. Mateusz Piwowarski & Uma Shankar Singh & Kesra Nermend, 2019. "The Cognitive Neuroscience Methods in the Analysis of the Impact of Advertisements in Shaping People's Health Habits," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(4), pages 457-471.
    8. Alison Macintyre & Ho Fai Chan & Markus Schaffner & Benno Torgler, 2021. "National Pride and Tax Compliance: A Laboratory Experiment Using a Physiological Marker," CREMA Working Paper Series 2021-07, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    9. Halko, Marja-Liisa & Sääksvuori, Lauri, 2017. "Competitive behavior, stress, and gender," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 96-109.
    10. Armin Falk & Fabian Kosse & Ingo Menrath & Pablo E. Verde & Johannes Siegrist, 2018. "Unfair Pay and Health," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(4), pages 1477-1488, April.
    11. Marc T. P. Adam & Timm Teubner & Henner Gimpel, 2018. "No Rage Against the Machine: How Computer Agents Mitigate Human Emotional Processes in Electronic Negotiations," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 27(4), pages 543-571, August.
    12. Kim, Do-Hoon, 2020. "Human factors influencing the ship operator's perceived risk in the last moment of collision encounter," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 203(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:qut:qubewp:wp003 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Casal, Sandro & Güth, Werner & Jia, Mofei & Ploner, Matteo, 2012. "Would you mind if I get more? An experimental study of the envy game," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(3), pages 857-865.
    3. He, Haoran & Wu, Keyu, 2016. "Choice set, relative income, and inequity aversion: An experimental investigation," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 177-193.
    4. Leibbrandt, Andreas & López-Pérez, Raúl & Spiegelman, Eli, 2023. "Reciprocal, but inequality averse as well? Mixed motives for punishment and reward," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 210(C), pages 91-116.
    5. Nikos Nikiforakis & Helen Mitchell, 2014. "Mixing the carrots with the sticks: third party punishment and reward," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 17(1), pages 1-23, March.
    6. Mago, Shakun D. & Pate, Jennifer & Razzolini, Laura, 2024. "Experimental evidence on the role of outside obligations in wage negotiations," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 219(C), pages 528-548.
    7. Alberti, Federica & Güth, Werner, 2013. "Studying deception without deceiving participants: An experiment of deception experiments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 196-204.
    8. Barron, Kai & Stüber, Robert & van Veldhuizen, Roel, 2019. "Motivated motive selection in the lying-dictator game," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change SP II 2019-303, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    9. Nicklisch, Andreas & Wolff, Irenaeus, 2012. "On the nature of reciprocity: Evidence from the ultimatum reciprocity measure," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(3), pages 892-905.
    10. Erik O. Kimbrough & Alexander Vostroknutov, 2016. "Norms Make Preferences Social," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 608-638, June.
    11. Reuben, Ernesto & van Winden, Frans, 2008. "Social ties and coordination on negative reciprocity: The role of affect," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(1-2), pages 34-53, February.
    12. Fabio Galeotti & Maria Montero & Anders Poulsen, 2015. "Efficiency versus equality in real-time bargaining with communication," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 15-18, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    13. Fabio Galeotti & Maria Montero & Anders Poulsen, 2019. "Efficiency Versus Equality in Bargaining," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 17(6), pages 1941-1970.
    14. Alexia Gaudeul, 2013. "Social preferences under uncertainty," Jena Economics Research Papers 2013-024, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    15. Sven Fischer, 2005. "Inequality Aversion in Ultimatum Games with Asymmetric Conflict Payoffs - A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis -," Papers on Strategic Interaction 2005-36, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group.
    16. Brunner, Markus & Ostermaier, Andreas, 2018. "Implicit communication in the ultimatum game," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 11-19.
    17. Leder, Johannes & Betsch, Tilmann, 2016. "Risky choice in interpersonal context: Do people dare because they care?," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 1-23.
    18. Andreas Nicklisch, 2008. "Inequity Aversion, Reciprocity, and Appropriateness in the Ultimatum-Revenge Game," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2008_24, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    19. Kai Barron & Robert Stüber & Roel van Veldhuizen, 2022. "Moral Motive Selection in the Lying-Dictator Game," CESifo Working Paper Series 9911, CESifo.
    20. repec:dgr:uvatin:20040098 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Bigoni, Maria & Bortolotti, Stefania & Nas Özen, Efşan, 2021. "Economic polarization and antisocial behavior: An experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 387-401.
    22. Reuben, Ernesto & van Winden, Frans, 2010. "Fairness perceptions and prosocial emotions in the power to take," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 908-922, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0108218. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.