IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/upf/upfgen/1306.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are self-regarding subjects more rational?

Author

Abstract

Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree of rationality, self-regarding subjects show more strategic sophistication than other subjects.

Suggested Citation

  • Benito Arruñada & Marco Casari & Francesca Pancotto, 2012. "Are self-regarding subjects more rational?," Economics Working Papers 1306, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    • Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1306
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1306.pdf
    File Function: Whole Paper
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gary Charness & Matthew Rabin, 2002. "Understanding Social Preferences with Simple Tests," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(3), pages 817-869.
    2. 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.
    3. James C. Cox & Vjollca Sadiraj, 2012. "Direct Tests Of Individual Preferences For Efficiency And Equity," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 50(4), pages 920-931, October.
    4. Arruñada, Benito & Casari, Marco, 2016. "Fragile markets: An experiment on judicial independence," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 142-156.
    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. Ho, Teck-Hua & Camerer, Colin & Weigelt, Keith, 1998. "Iterated Dominance and Iterated Best Response in Experimental "p-Beauty Contests."," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(4), pages 947-969, September.
    7. Nagel, Rosemarie, 1995. "Unraveling in Guessing Games: An Experimental Study," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(5), pages 1313-1326, December.
    8. Selten, Reinhard, 1998. "Features of experimentally observed bounded rationality," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(3-5), pages 413-436, May.
    9. 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.
    10. Grosskopf, Brit & Nagel, Rosemarie, 2008. "The two-person beauty contest," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 93-99, January.
    11. Colin F. Camerer & Teck-Hua Ho & Juin-Kuan Chong, 2004. "A Cognitive Hierarchy Model of Games," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(3), pages 861-898.
    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. Duffy, Sean & Smith, John, 2014. "Cognitive load in the multi-player prisoner's dilemma game: Are there brains in games?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 47-56.
    2. Chen, Chia-Ching & Chiu, I-Ming & Smith, John & Yamada, Tetsuji, 2013. "Too smart to be selfish? Measures of cognitive ability, social preferences, and consistency," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 112-122.
    3. Allred, Sarah & Duffy, Sean & Smith, John, 2016. "Cognitive load and strategic sophistication," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 162-178.

    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. B. Arru ada & M. Casari & F. Pancotto, 2012. "Are Self-regarding Subjects More Strategic?," Working Papers wp805, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    2. Despoina Alempaki & Andrew M. Colman & Felix Kölle & Graham Loomes & Briony D. Pulford, 2022. "Investigating the failure to best respond in experimental games," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(2), pages 656-679, April.
    3. Teck H. Ho & Noah Lim & Colin Camerer, 2005. "Modeling the Psychology of Consumer and Firm Behavior with Behavioral Economics," Levine's Bibliography 784828000000000476, UCLA Department of Economics.
    4. repec:uea:wcbess:13-02 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Zoe Bett & Anders Poulsen & Odile Poulsen, 2013. "How Salient is an Equal but Inefficient Outcome in a Coordination Situation? Some Experimental Evidence," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 13-02-R, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    6. Polonio, Luca & Di Guida, Sibilla & Coricelli, Giorgio, 2015. "Strategic sophistication and attention in games: An eye-tracking study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 80-96.
    7. James Bland & Nikos Nikiforakis, 2013. "Tacit Coordination in Games with Third-Party Externalities," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2013_19, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    8. Volker Benndorf & Dorothea Kübler & Hans-Theo Normann, 2017. "Depth of Reasoning and Information Revelation: An Experiment on the Distribution of k-Levels," International Game Theory Review (IGTR), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 19(04), pages 1-18, December.
    9. Bayer, Ralph C. & Renou, Ludovic, 2016. "Logical omniscience at the laboratory," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 41-49.
    10. López-Pérez, Raúl & Pintér, Ágnes & Kiss, Hubert J., 2015. "Does payoff equity facilitate coordination? A test of Schelling's conjecture," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 209-222.
    11. James Andreoni & Laura Gee, 2015. "Gunning for efficiency with third party enforcement in threshold public goods," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(1), pages 154-171, March.
    12. Stahl, Dale O. & Haruvy, Ernan, 2008. "Level-n bounded rationality in two-player two-stage games," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 41-61, January.
    13. Joshua Zonca & Giorgio Coricelli & Luca Polonio, 2019. "Does exposure to alternative decision rules change gaze patterns and behavioral strategies in games?," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 5(1), pages 14-25, August.
    14. Polonio, Luca & Coricelli, Giorgio, 2019. "Testing the level of consistency between choices and beliefs in games using eye-tracking," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 566-586.
    15. Christian Thoeni & Simon Gaechter, 2011. "Peer Effects and Social Preferences in Voluntary Cooperation," Discussion Papers 2011-09, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    16. Therese Lindahl & Magnus Johannesson, 2009. "Bargaining over a Common Good with Private Information," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 111(3), pages 547-565, September.
    17. Bayer, R.-C. & Renou, Ludovic, 2016. "Logical abilities and behavior in strategic-form games," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 39-59.
    18. Silvester Van Koten & Andreas Ortmann & Vitezslav Babicky, 2013. "Fairness in Risky Environments: Theory and Evidence," Games, MDPI, vol. 4(2), pages 1-35, May.
    19. Benito Arru ada & Marco Casari, 2007. "How enforcement institutions affect markets," Purdue University Economics Working Papers 1200, Purdue University, Department of Economics.
    20. Werner Güth & M. Levati & Matteo Ploner, 2012. "An experimental study of the generosity game," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 72(1), pages 51-63, January.
    21. Krawczyk, Michal & Le Lec, Fabrice, 2015. "Can we neutralize social preference in experimental games?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 340-355.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    steps of reasoning; other-regarding preferences;

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:upf:upfgen:1306. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.econ.upf.edu/ .

    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.