Abstract
Many previous experiments document that behavior in multi-person settings responds to the name of the game and the labeling of strategies. With a few exceptions, these studies cannot tell whether frames affect preferences or beliefs. In three large experiments, we investigate whether social framing effects are also present in Dictator games. Since only one of the subjects makes a decision, the frame can affect behavior merely through preferences. In all the experiments, we find that behavior is insensitive to social framing. We discuss how to reconcile the absence of social framing effects in Dictator games with the presence of social framing effects in Ultimatum games.
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Notes
See also Andreoni (1995), Brewer and Kramer (1986), Cookson (2000), Ellingsen et al. (2012), McDaniel and Sistrunk (1991), McCusker and Carnevale (1995), Pillutla and Chen (1999), Sell and Son (1997), Sonnemans et al. (1998), van Dijk and Wilke (2000), and Zhong et al. (2007). There are also some studies that fail to find the expected social framing effects, notably Brandts and Schwieren (2009), Cubitt et al. (2011), Dufwenberg et al. (2011), and Rege and Telle (2004). However, in Rege and Telle (2004) the effect size is large, so the lack of statistical significance might be due to a small sample, and Dufwenberg et al. (2011) have inadvertently, but instructively, used ambiguous social frames. Most of the above works consider relatively “light” social framing, i.e., manipulations of labels only. The earliest studies, by Deutsch (1958, 1960), apply “heavy” social framing, with more pronounced demands on behavior.
If people care only about the own material payoff, beliefs should play no role in a Prisoners’ dilemma. However, various common forms of altruism and reciprocity suffice to map a material Prisoners’ dilemma into a game with multiple equilibria; see Ellingsen et al. (2012) for formalities.
Relatedly, Cubitt et al. (2011) study the impact of framing on punishment and emotions in a one-shot social dilemma with and without punishment. They find no evidence that the frame affects punishment behavior or emotions, leading them to conclude that social preferences are relatively stable. However, the framing effect on initial contributions is also insignificant in their study.
In the concluding section, we discuss the closely related unpublished study by Suvoy (2003), which was recently brought to our attention by Sujoy Chakravarty. There we also discuss the findings of Leliveld et al. (2008) concerning framing effects in Ultimatum games. For completeness, let us here also mention one additional related study. Keysar et al. (2008) ostensibly let pairs of subjects play a sequence of two Dictator games, with some pairs acting under a “give” frame and other pairs under a “take” frame. Leaving aside the problem that an even allocation of the money can be attained after any decision by the first mover, the experiment must be interpreted with caution for several reasons. First, only one participant is being paid. Thus, at most one of the subjects in a pair will be playing with real money. When the first mover chooses an even split rather than to keep all the money, this could thus be seen as an implicit suggestion of mutual insurance. Due to risk aversion, both players getting 50 is preferable to both players having an even chance of 100 and 0. Second, the experiment involves severe deception: In fact, there is no first mover. All subjects are second movers, being led to believe that the first mover chose an even split. Apparently many of the participants anticipated being deceived, as data for ten of the fifty participants in the relevant experiment were excluded because these participants didn’t believe that there was a second mover.
Besides the evidence that social frames matter in multi-person games, there is evidence that other sorts of frames can matter in single-person decision problems. For example, in a seminal study, Tversky and Kahneman (1981) showed that people’s ranking of lotteries depend on whether outcomes are framed as gains or losses. For a survey of individual choice effects of wording, see Levin et al. (1998). For a suggestion how to take account of framing effects in decision theory, see Salant and Rubinstein (2008).
At the time of writing, the literature on Dictator games comprises more than 120 published articles; see Engel (2011) for a recent survey.
Recall that Becker and Stigler (1977), while defending preference stability, never insisted that people ought to be seen as selfish materialists. To the contrary, throughout his career, Gary Becker has been a leading advocate of social preferences. His models are populated with agents having tastes for (out-group) discrimination as well as (in-group) altruism. See, e.g., Becker (1974).
Kritikos and Bolle (2005) introduce asymmetric information about the dictator’s endowment and show that some dictators with a large endowment choose to give half of the smaller endowment. Related effects were previously documented in the Ultimatum game literature, where experiments vary responders’ knowledge of proposers’ endowment; see, e.g., Mitzkewitz and Nagel (1993). However, here it is difficult to disentangle effects stemming from social esteem concerns from effects stemming from strategic responder behavior.
Another possibility is that the ideal point changes for some subjects, who think that the norm prescribes an equal split of whatever surplus they have the power to distribute.
There are also several studies suggesting that subtle primes, such as pictures of eyes or a few dots arranged like a face on the computer screen, affect behavior in Dictator games (Haley and Fessler 2005; Rigdon et al. 2009). One interpretation is that these cues subconsciously enhance concerns for social esteem or decrease the felt social distance.
The flier contained the following text: “Participate in a behavioral study in the Science Center, Room 232: 11 am–4 pm. Participation takes about 10 min. You earn $5–15. If you are interested in participating, drop by at 11 am, 12 pm, 12:30 pm, 1 pm 1:30 pm, 2 pm, 2:30 pm, 3 pm, or 4 pm.”
Instead using Tobit regression with robust standard errors, to account for the minimum (0) and maximum (100) transfer percentages, gives qualitatively equivalent results. We choose to report OLS results so as to have directly interpretable coefficients.
We consistently find a significant positive effect of female gender on dictator transfer.
ANOVA finds no significant effect of the Game name (p=0.421) or of Recipient information (p=0.233), and no significant interaction between the two (p=0.890).
As mentioned in the Introduction, Dana et al. (2006) do find a significant effect of recipient knowledge on dictator exit behavior.
The benefit of incentives is to reduce noise, whereas the main cost is to introduce bias through hedging. With our large sample small payoffs we think that both problems are small. For recent discussions of the costs and benefits of incentivizing belief elicitation, see Armantier and Treich (2010) and Blanco et al. (2010).
The job was titled “Participate in a brief decision-making study” and the advertisement read “Participate in a brief study. In this HIT, you will be asked to participate in a short decision-making study followed by a brief survey. In addition to your initial payment of $0.20, you will have the opportunity to earn a bonus of up to $1.00, for a total payment of up to $1.20. To begin, please follow the study instructions here (the link will open in a new browser window). At the end of the study, you will be given a unique completion code. Paste the completion code below, and click submit. YOU MUST PASTE THE COMPLETION CODE BELOW TO RECEIVE YOUR BONUS.”
Online labor markets in general, and MTurk in particular, have recently received considerable attention as powerful platforms for performing incentive-compatible experiments. On MTurk, employers hire workers from around the world to complete short tasks for small amounts of money (usually less than $1). This allows researchers to recruit large number of subjects quickly with little effort or expense. Stakes are generally much lower in MTurk experiments than in physical lab experiments, a feature that is partly justified by the much smaller time costs associated with participating. Online experiments also necessarily permit less control over subjects during the study. To address these and other concerns regarding the validity of experiments run on MTurk, a number of replication studies have been undertaken. Most relevant for the present study, the effect of $1 stakes in dictator games on MTurk has been shown to be similar to that in the physical laboratory (Amir et al. 2012), and the same study finds that the average donation is very similar to the most common average transfer across many studies in the recent meta-analysis of Engel 2011. Furthermore, quantitative agreement between behavior on MTurk and in the physical lab has been demonstrated in a one-shot prisoners’ dilemma (Horton et al. 2011) and a repeated 4-player public goods game (Suri and Watts 2011), and it has been shown that subjects on MTurk respond to framing manipulations (Paolacci et al. 2010; Horton et al. 2011).
As in Study 1, instead using Tobit regression gives qualitatively equivalent results.
ANOVA finds no significant effect of Game name (p=0.570) or of Action label (p=0.934), and no significant interaction between the two (p=0.913).
The difference between expected and actual transfers remains non-significant when including only attentive subjects (Rank-sum, p>0.10 for all comparisons).
The job was titled “Short academic study” and the advertisement read “Participate in a short decision-making study. You will make several decisions and answer a very short survey in this study. In total it will take less than 7 minutes. For your participation, you will receive $0.50 plus a bonus of up to $1.00. To begin, please follow the study instructions here (the link will open in a new browser window). At the end of the study, you will be given a unique completion code. Paste the completion code below, and click submit. YOU MUST PASTE THE COMPLETION CODE BELOW FOR YOUR HIT TO BE ACCEPTED.”
While demographic information on MTurk is self-reported, it has been shown that country of residence reporting is reliable based on comparison with IP address (Rand 2012), and that there is a high degree of test-retest reliability for other demographic variables.
The text was as follows: “regular old put-a-stamp-on-it mail. If you can’t be there in person, send a letter. And if you have trouble finding the time, let us help you!”
ANOVA finds no significant effect of Game name (p=0.860) or Recipient information (p=0.171), and no significant interaction between the two (p=0.670).
To the best of our knowledge, this game was first studied by Suleiman (1996).
Another explanation is that procedures differ in the two studies. We are particularly concerned that subjects in a study conducted by psychologists are suspicious that they are being deceived or that payments are not real. (As it happens, Leliveld, van Dijk, and van Beest deceived their subjects, because they were not playing against another subject at all, and ultimate payments didn’t depend on their behavior, despite instructions to the contrary.) In this case, some subjects may simply decide to neglect the monetary incentives and instead behave either according to some moral norm or as they think that the experimenters desire.
It has been previously demonstrated in the traditional (offline) laboratory that subjects cooperation more when the PD is called the ‘Community game’ relative to the ‘Wall Street game’ (Liberman et al. 2004). In this replication, we used the term ‘Profit game’ instead of ‘Wall Street game’ because of the particular negative valence attached to Wall Street in the mind of (at least) the American public at the time of the experiment.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rachel Sheketoff, Nils Wernerfelt and Xiaoqi Zhou for research assistance and to Jordi Brandts and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Financial support from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation and the Swedish Research Council is gratefully acknowledged, and DGR is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
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Appendix: Framing in a one-shot prisoners’ dilemma on MTurk
Appendix: Framing in a one-shot prisoners’ dilemma on MTurk
To demonstrate the presence of framing effects on MTurk in games where both subjects make a decision, we recruited 400 subjects from MTurk in February 2011 to play a modified one-shot Prisoners’ dilemma game. Subjects were randomly allocated to one of two framing treatments. All subjects were paid a show-up fee of 25 cents. The study took on average 4 minutes to complete.
Subjects were informed that they were playing either the ‘Community game’ or the ‘Profit game.’Footnote 30 Then they read identical instructions for the following Prisoners’ dilemma, indicated their decision (A or B), and completed a post-experimental questionnaire.
Unlike in our Dictator game experiments, we do find substantial variation in Prisoners’ dilemma cooperation across treatments (Community game: 65 % cooperation, Profit game: 58 % cooperation). To test for effects of the game name, we use logistic regression with robust standard errors, taking decision to cooperate (i.e. choose option ‘A’) as the dependent variable, and including controls for gender, age and country of residence. We find a negative effect of the ‘Profit game’ frame on cooperation (coeff=−0.446, p=0.043; Table 5).
Thus we show that framing effects do occur on MTurk in games where both players make a decision. This supports our conclusion that the lack of framing effects in our Dictator games is the result of the unilateral nature of the dictator game decision setting.
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Dreber, A., Ellingsen, T., Johannesson, M. et al. Do people care about social context? Framing effects in dictator games. Exp Econ 16, 349–371 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9341-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9341-9