Working Paper

Minimally acceptable altruism and the ultimatum game


Abstract: I suppose that people react with anger when others show themselves not to be minimally altruistic. With heterogeneous agents, this can account for the experimental results of ultimatum and dictator games. Moreover, it can account for the surprisingly large fraction of individuals who offer an even split, with parameter values that are more plausible than those required to explain outcomes in these experiments with the models of Levine (1998), Fehr and Schmidt (1999), Dickinson (2000), and Bolton and Ockenfels (2000).

Keywords: Game theory; Altruism;

Access Documents

File(s): File format is text/html http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0612.htm

File(s): File format is application/pdf http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0612.pdf

Authors

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2006

Number: 06-12