Fairness in Modern Society

Fairness in Modern Society

Presented by: Fadi Amroush

Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment

Joseph Henrich,* Jean Ensminger, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Clark Barrett,

Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, Edwins Gwako, NatalieHenrich, Carolyn Lesorogol, Frank Marlowe, David Tracer, John Ziker

Published 19 March 2010, Science 327, 1480 (2010)DOI: 10.1126/science.1182238

Experimental Economics

Outlines

Motivation1

GAME DESCRIPTIONS2

3

Results & Conclusion 4

Run The Experiment

New Treatment5

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Motivation

What features of a society motivate individuals to behave fairly?

If notions of fairness are, indeed, calibrated to the Paleolithic, then any variation from place to place should be random.

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The Games

1

Dictator Game.

good measure of the first player’s sense of fairness, since he has

the power to be as unfair as he likes.

3

Third Party Punishment Game (TPG)

Interactions with third parties.

2

The Strategy Method Ultimatum Game (UG)

That provides a measure of willingness

to punish, even at a cost to the punisher

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Paper Aim

Economic -integrated

The degree to which a society is economically integrated .

The Relationship

Religion

Religious the individu- als within it are.

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Dictator Game DG.

Two anonymous players are allotted (the stake) in a one shot interaction ‐ .

The first player Player 1 can offer a portion of this sum to a second player Player 2.

Player 1 has the job of deciding how the stake is divided between the two players.

Player 2 is passive in this game and merely receives what is offered.

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Dictator Game DG.

In this one shot‐ anonymous game, a purely self interested ‐ Player 1 would offer zero.

Offers in the DG provide a measure of a kind of behavioral fairness that is not directly linked to kinship, reciprocity, reputation, or the immediate threat of punishment.

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Strategy Method Ultimatum Game

The Stake is allocated to the pair. The first Player 1 is given the first of two moves in deciding how the money

will be allocated between the two anonymous players . The second player must decide what offer he would accept (within a 10%

margin of error) In this game the actual offer made can be rejected by Player 2, in which

case neither player receives anything.

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Strategy Method Ultimatum Game

The “strategy method” extension of this game refers to the fact that Player2 , before hearing the actual amount offered by Player 1, must decide whether to accept or reject each of the possible offers, and that these decisions are binding.

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Strategy Method Ultimatum Game

If people are motivated purely by self interest, ‐ Player 2 will always accept any positive offer; knowing this, Player 1 should offer the smallest non zero ‐amount.

Because this One shot‐ anonymous interaction, Player 2’s willingness to reject provides one measure of costly punishment, termed second party ‐punishment.

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Third Party Punishment Game (TPG)

Two players are allotted the stake and a third player gets one half of this ‐amount .

Player 1 must decide how much of the stake to give to Player 2 (who makes no decisions).

before giving the actual amount Player 1 allocated to Player 2, Player 3 has to decide whether to pay 20% of his allocation to punish Player 1,causing Player 1 to suffer a deduction of 30% of the stake from the amount he kept

for himself.

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Third Party Punishment Game (TPG)

For example, suppose the stake is $100: If Player 1 gives $10 to Player 2 (and keeps $90 for himself), and Player 3

says he wants to punish this offer amount, then Player 1 takes home $60, Player 2 $10, and Player 3 $40.

If Player 3 had instead decided not to punish offers of 10%, then the take home amounts would be $90, $10, and $50, respectively.

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Third Party Punishment Game (TPG)

In this anonymous one shot game‐ , a purely self-interested Player 3 would never pay to punish Player 1.

A self interested ‐ Player 1 should always offer zero to Player 2. Thus, an individual’s willingness to pay to punish provides a direct measure of his taste for a second type of costly punishment, third party punishment.

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Playing Sequence

DG UG TGP

Fresh players

Player 1 in the DG and, or Player 2 in DG

Player 1 in the UG and Player 2 in UG

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Run The Experiment

Show up Stakes Language Sample

Fees

20 25% of ‐one day’s

wage in the local

economy.

Real money

one day’s minimum

wage in the local

community.

Native

All game instructions were read by native speakers

sample

2,148 volunteers

from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies.

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Run The Experiment

The societies in question included the Dolgan (hunters in Siberia), the Hadza (foraging nomads in Tanzania) and the Sanquianga (fishermen in Colombia)..

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Run The Experiment

Economic game. A “Third-Party Punishment Game” - An experimenter is shown demonstrating such a game in a remote region of Papua New Guinea.

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Results

Those societies that most resemble the anthropological consensus of what Paleolithic life would have been like (hunting and gathering, with only a modicum of trade) were the ones where fairness seemed to count least.

People living in communities that lack market integration display relatively little concern with fairness or with punishing unfairness in transactions.

Notions of fairness increase steadily as societies achieve greater market integration.

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Results

People from better economic -integrated societies are also more likely to punish those who do not play fair, even when this is costly to themselves.

The sense of fairness in a society was linked to the degree of its participation in a world religion. Participation in such religion led to offers in the dictator game that were up to 10 percentage points higher than those of non-participants.

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Results

World religions, with their moral codes, and their beliefs in heaven and hell, might indeed be expected to enforce notions of fairness on their participants, so this observation makes sense.

From an economic point of view, therefore, such judgmental religions are actually a progressive force.

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New Treatment

If the dictator’s choice ,set ranges from -$5 to +$5 instead of from 0 to $5, The proportion of positive offers falls from 71 to 10% (J. A. List, J. Polit. Econ. 115, 482 (2007)).

This suggests that another motivation for sharing is a desire to avoid the most selfish feasible action. This motive would lead dictators to share when the choice set ranges from zero.

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LOGO

The dictator, after making an allocation decision is given the option to exit the game and keep the full stake less a small amount. The exit option leaves the other player with zero but also ensures that he never knows that a Dictator Game was to be played.

One-third of the dictators take the exit option ,Thus, some participants are willing to pay a price to avoid a situation in which they are expected to share because they dislike not doing so in that situation.(J. Dana, D. Cain, R. Dawes, Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 100, 193 (2006)).

What is the relation between fairness and those not exit (mine).

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New treatment

Change the rang to -$5 – 0 , to compare if we will have the same result , I think is may be good measure of fairness (mine).

Study the relation between fairness and people of medium level of income.

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