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PROFESSOR: OK, so what we're going
to do in talking about social preferences is the following.
We're going to start discussing what our social preferences.
We're going to just talk about what
do we think social preferences are
and how do we think about them, how do we measure them.
This is partially what we did already
in class last week, which gives you
some sense of some ways of measuring them.
There are also other ways of doing that.
We're going to discuss that.
We're going to also discuss a bit
kind of like the measurements that we
did in class that seem sort of pretty
contrived in various ways.
Are they actually predictive in some ways of real world
behavior that we care about?
Then we're going to ask the question,
well, it seems like, from measuring social preferences,
as we did in class, but also in some experiments that we see,
it looks like people are actually
quite nice to each other.
But we're going to ask the question,
are people just genuinely nice to each other?
Do they actually care about others?
Or is it just like, in some ways,
perhaps, social image or other issues about like they
want to look nice or they want to feel
good by being nice to others or look like they're
nice to others, as opposed to generally caring
about the well-being of others.
And we can talk through some experiments
and some evidence that lets us disentangle
between those kinds of hypotheses--
are people genuinely nice or are they sort of just trying
to look nice in various ways?
And then we're going to talk a bit
about evidence towards the end.
This is the paper by Gautam Rao and others,
which is the question about are social preferences malleable
and can policies change pro-sociality.
That is to say, can we do certain things,
can we mix people in certain ways-- it can be like this will
be how roommates are chosen, and the specific people
we're going to talk about is from India,
where poor students are mixed with rich students.
And does that affect how nice people
are, the rich students, in this case, towards poor students,
but also towards other people in general.
So are there some policies that we can perhaps implement
that help people, society as a whole, being more pro-social
and people being nicer to each other
or doing things that are good for the greater
good, if you want, overall.
As before, we're going to look at two types of evidence.
We're going to look at lab experiments and field evidence.
Lab experiments are the types of experiments
that you saw so far.
And field evidence are sort of the type of experiments
where we look at students being mixed, rich and poor students.
What happens then to people's social preferences
when you do that?
OK, so now let's sort of back up a little
bit into review, very quickly, of what we did last week.
I showed you sort of an action, three games
to measure social preferences.
These are not randomly selected games,
these are the most prevalent, the most commonly-used games
in behavioral and experimental economics,
which is the dictator game, ultimatum game, and the trust
game.
You can read descriptions and discussions of these games
in the background readings, which is Camerer and Fehr 2004.
Now what are these games?
I'm going to briefly review them right now.
And then I'm going to go to the evidence
and go back to evidence that actually uses these games.
So what are the games, just to recap?
There's the dictator game, which is very simple,
where the dictator gets some money allocated to him or her.
And there's another person who is the recipient.
And a dictator just gets to choose
how much money does he or she wants
to give to this other person.
That's it.
You can think of this as some raw concern for others,
essentially to say, when you don't know anything
about this other person-- often these games
are anonymous-- here's an anonymous person whom
you could give some money.
And often it's another student.
It could be like a poor person in Kenya or elsewhere.
Here's a person with whom you don't have
any interactions whatsoever.
How much money do you want for yourself?
How much money do you want for this other person?
The original version is just sort of 1 to 1.
Any dollar that you give is given directly
to this other person.
There's different versions where essentially any dollar is
converted, where essentially the exchange rate is varied,
where it's cheaper or more expensive,
if you give a dollar, the other person gets $2.00 or $0.50
or the like.
OK, so that's the dictator game.
What's the ultimatum game?
It's sort of like a bargaining game if you want.
It's sort of very, very simple game theory if you want.
You can use that, which is essentially used again
by experimental economists.
What they do is there's two players again.
There's a proposer or the sender that gives, again, like,
some divisible pie.
Think of this as $10 or the like.
Often it's money.
And then you say a portion of x is given, then,
to the responder.
The responder then has the chance
to either accept or reject.
If the responder accepts, then the division
is just implemented.
If the responder rejects, then essentially both players
get nothing.
And why is it a game now?
Well, it's because essentially the proposer
needs to sort of take into account what
the other person is going to do and have
some beliefs about that and anticipating that, then sort
make that choice of how much money would you like to give.
Finally, there's the trust game, which
is, in fact, very similar to the ultimatum
game except for that the amount sent by the sender
is tripled before the decider is supposed to say--
before they decide how much to return,
the recipient decides how much return, if anything.
So now essentially, it's like a high-return opportunity
to give money, essentially in a situation of high trust.
In particular, there's communication.
If I'm playing with somebody, I would tell that person,
yes, give me all of the money.
And if you are nice to me, that money is tripled,
and I give you half of it back, or the like.
So both of us are better off.
If there's lots of trust between us, that's actually
implementable, and a sense of, like, I'm telling you,
give me that money, you'll give me that money,
and then I'm actually returning that money.
But of course, if there's no trust,
then that's what the game name comes from, the trust game.
If there's no trust, I'm going to tell you, give me
a bunch of money, you might actually do that,
and then I'll just keep it all for myself.
Or you might not even believe me in the first place.
You might just say, yeah, I'd love to, but I don't trust you,
Frank.
I give you nothing.
And then essentially, nothing is tripled.
And that's meant to then measure some form of trust in society
or that people have with each other.
We're going to go back to that in trying
to see what does it actually measure in the real world.
So just sort of having said that,
those are those three things you saw.
And then there's different versions
of these games that could be sort of like-- you
can vary the privacy.
Are these games private versus public?
Is it anonymous?
Do you know who the other person is versus not?
Is there communication?
Can you talk to this other person or not?
And what are the stakes?
Are we talking about hypothetical choices?
Are we talking about money?
High stakes with money.
Are we talking about other goods like apples or chocolate?
Any questions so far?
We'll get back to the actual evidence,
but I should make sure that these games are
clear to everyone.
That's sort of what happened last time.
OK.
Now, backing up a little bit now,
then the question is, like, what is, in fact,
social preferences?
And so most economic analysis in some way
assumes away social preferences and sort of assumes
self-interest, very narrowly defined.
And so that means that people essentially only care
about their own interests and their own outcomes,
and then the market is sort of taking care of the rest.
And this is at the heart of what Adam Smith originally
was saying, I think, in The Wealth of Nations,
which is like, "It's not from the benevolence of the butcher,
the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,
but from their regard for their own interest.
We address ourselves not to their humanity,
but to their self-love, and never talk
to them of our necessity, but of their advantage."
That is to say that when everybody is very selfish
and cares about themselves, just comparative advantage
and the ability to trade with each other
will make sure that other people do useful things for us.
So you can do the work you do, make some money,
and then go to the bakery.
And the baker will give you some bread in exchange
for some money, not because the baker likes you or wants
to be friends with you or the like, but because you pay them,
and it's in their interest to give you
good bread because you're going to pay them,
and you're going to come back perhaps and buy
more bread in the future.
So that's sort of a pretty reasonable assumption
in saying people are doing useful things for each other
as part of a market transaction.
And that's what a lot of economics
has assumed and done for a long time.
Now, that is not a bad assumption
at all in the sense of, like, it's actually
pretty realistic in various ways in thinking about humans.
The question is not necessarily whether there
are some instances of whether people care about others.
The question that we're going to ask is, like, well,
what do we miss by ignoring social preferences?
And so it's pretty clear that preferences
depart from pure self-interest in non-trivial ways.
And the question we're going to ask is, like, are there
some concrete settings where we really
care about this and sort of say, well,
we should model things differently?
And if we do that, we can understand certain phenomena
better.
So the goal is here to understand
how common and important these departures are
and what their nature is, like, how can we best model these.
And here's a nice example of perhaps how one
might want to think about social preferences
and how perhaps people think about social preferences.
So this is a picture--
I don't know how well you can see this--
taken in Hawaii, which is a box where
banana bread is being sold.
It's freely available to everybody,
so you can just take it.
I think there's some price tag somewhere.
There's also a lockbox next to it on the left of the picture
where you can deposit payments.
So the banana bread costs some money.
You can deposit your payments.
There's nobody that enforces it, but the lockbox
is such that it's actually locked in a sense
that you can't take away the box.
So when you see that picture, what
perception of social preferences or humanity does that reflect?
How do we think about this picture?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: That we're going to be honest and give the money based
on how much [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right.
So one assumption, to some degree,
is, like, well, people seem pretty nice in general.
It seems in a sense of, like, we allow
them to just take the banana bread
and run away and not put in anything.
We sort of ask them nicely.
It costs, like, $1 or $5 or whatever.
Please put in the money.
It seems like the conception to some degree
is, like, people are going to be nice and just do that.
Is that all, or is there something else?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Maybe there's an expectation
not that everyone would do the right thing,
but that the loss from some people who would just
take the bread and run will be maybe less than, for example,
the cost of labor or staffing the booth.
PROFESSOR: Right.
Exactly.
So there's some-- the expectation,
to be more precise, is not everybody is going to be nice,
but on average, most people are going to be pretty nice
or adhering to this normal rule that you should pay some money.
And some people might run, but as you say,
it might not be worth standing there in the heat all day
to make up for that.
Exactly.
And then what else is there?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: It gives a perception of,
like, you don't expect them to steal banana bread,
but you expect them to steal the money, so you lock it.
PROFESSOR: Right, there's a lock.
So it's like, in some sense, you sort of think
that, on the one hand, the assumption is most people are
going to be pretty nice.
But if we allow them to run away with all the money,
at least there are some people who, if allowed,
would not be nice at all.
In fact, they would take away the money and not
only not pay for the banana bread,
but also take away the lockbox.
So that's exactly what I've written down here,
which is to say people in general are nice enough.
Most will probably pay for the banana bread,
so it's not worth sort of standing around and ensuring
that.
But people also can be selfish.
At least, some people will be quite selfish.
So if a lot of cash were easy to take,
someone at least would take it.
Notice that's not an assumption about everybody, or even
the majority.
It's just to say there's a fraction of people
who, if given the opportunity, might take away our money
and run from it.
So that's actually a pretty good sort
of perspective for thinking about social preferences, which
is to say that self-interest is probably
a major driver of behavior in many economic contexts.
In some situations, self-interest is not
the main motive, in some sense.
Again, we don't need to necessarily enforce
this for everybody.
People will be quite nice.
But there will be-- some seemingly small departures
from pure self-interest can dramatically
influence economic outcomes.
That is to say, if we couldn't lock the box,
if you were not doing that, somebody would take away
this box.
And now we couldn't offer banana bread to anybody,
and the whole transaction would go down.
Put differently, if we had things like a theft or robbery
and so on, if there's some people who are really
mean and essentially take away all of our money,
now we can't do any transaction.
I can't have a shop trying to sell stuff to people.
This is the examples [INAUDIBLE] positive and negative.
Small things can actually make huge differences for others.
This is like helping a stranger with directions
or helping a stranger who wants to go to the hospital
and so on.
That could make huge differences in their lives,
even if the-- or calling an ambulance for somebody, that
can make huge differences people's lives,
even though the action from your side
is actually relatively small.
Helping a fellow student with computer trouble
or other issues that they might have,
helping somebody who is sad on a given day
feel better about themselves.
In fact, as you might know, it's the Random Acts
of Kindness Week this week, so doing random acts of kindness
might actually make a huge difference in people's lives.
In fact, the problem said, well, we'll
ask you to do some of that, in fact.
Washing your hands is particularly pertinent
right now.
Again, you might think you're doing that to protect yourself,
and surely you are.
But in fact, there's also a huge externality potentially that,
like, by protecting yourself, you protect others
from potentially getting sick.
And that could make a huge difference in people's lives.
Any questions on this?
OK.
So now we're getting back to the ultimatum game.
I'm going to ask the question about how are people actually
behaving in real situations.
How do people behave in general?
And perhaps, what does game theory
say how people should behave?
How are people behaving in reality,
and how does that compare to how you guys behaved here in class?
So again, the ultimatum game, you should be familiar with.
There's a proposer, a responder.
Proposer proposes some split of the pie.
Responder can accept or reject.
Now, what does game theory predict what people should do?
Like, in the absence of social preferences?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right.
If you're the recipient, you'll care only
about your own output or your own outcomes.
Even if I offer you $0.01 or $0.05
or whatever, whatever is worth the transaction cost,
you're going to accept everything.
So if I'm playing with you, I'm going to anticipate--
I know that you will accept essentially
any offer that's positive.
Even zero, you might even accept,
because it's sort of like, why do you care?
But you strictly prefer a positive offer over no offer,
so you're going to accept that.
And then if I'm playing with you, anticipating that,
I will just give you essentially the lowest possible amount,
and that will be the outcomes.
Right?
So here it is.
The prediction is very clear.
The responder cares only-- this is, again,
game theory, but game theory in the absence
of social preferences.
I should be more precise.
So the responder cares only about money,
so she will accept any x that's smaller
than 0, any amount that's given, because that's better
than not having any money.
The proposer will understand that,
will only care about money as well,
so offers as little as possible.
The proposer doesn't care about how the recipient is doing.
So therefore, the proposer will just
offer as little as possible to maximize their own payout.
And then an equilibrium, that will essentially
be the zero or smallest possible offer will be made,
and that offer will be accepted.
So there will be no rejections, either because, essentially,
there's no reason to reject, and there will also
be no large offers of the like because there's no reason
to give more than minimal amounts.
OK.
So then what are typical results in the ultimatum game?
What do people actually find?
Well, so most people offer between 40% and 50% of the pie.
Such offers are mostly accepted.
The acceptance rate is increasing
in the offer, which is to say if you offer, like, 10%,
you have a pretty good chance of being rejected.
If you offer, like, 30%, 40%, 50%,
you're much more likely to be accepted.
And you offer, like, 70%, 80%, almost surely
you'll be accepted.
And an offer that's below 20% are mostly rejected.
Why is that?
Or what's the reason for that, presumably?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right.
And why are you sort of upset if somebody offers you 10%?
AUDIENCE: Because it shows they're disrespecting you.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, something about fairness or disrespect, or it's
just not a nice thing to do.
And now you'd rather not have any money
or not take $1 or whatever they offer to you.
You'd rather reject that, so you're
willing to give up $1 to essentially get back
at the other person.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: It could also be that for some people,
the thought of settling for such small amounts of money
is embarrassing, or it feels like it's demeaning
or [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Yeah, so it's one of those.
Some of it is-- yeah, exactly--
I think, demeaning, or just feels like--
so one way to put this is you have inequality aversion
in some ways in the sense of you just don't want to be
the person who has $1 when the other person has 9,
or you don't want to have $0.10 when the other has, like, 9.90.
So you really don't like inequality in some ways.
There are some versions of this game where the computer sort
of allocates these choices.
And you can look at how people are
rejecting those offers as well.
And they tend to not do that, which sort of suggests
that it's really coming from some sense of people
don't care so much about the outcome, per se.
They care about the fairness or the intention
of the other person.
But you're right.
There's other potential considerations at play.
Now, what do things look like in our class?
In fact, this looks quite similar to what
people do in general.
I know you're very special, but when
it comes to the ultimatum game, you're
actually pretty ordinary.
So what you see is, essentially, most people offer 40%, 50%.
Some people offer somewhat more.
You see in-- you can't see this that well.
You see it in red are the rejections.
So rejections tend to be on the left side,
in particular when people offer between 1% and 10%.
There seem to be around some rejections, so 50%,
or maybe it's just below 50%.
But usually, if you look at, essentially, about 50%,
or 40%, 50%, 60%, people tend to not reject any offers.
Any questions on that?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Could it also be that people
are anticipating future games?
Or maybe not [INAUDIBLE],, but sending a signal,
like there's any similar [INAUDIBLE]
be better off [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Yes, that's a great question.
So I kind of--
all of what I was doing, and I should
emphasize this a bit more--
the way I implemented some of these games in class,
some experimental economists would get a heart attack
in terms of how sloppy that was in a sense of, like,
a lot of these games, usually when I show you these results,
these are usually very careful games, where, essentially,
usually it's anonymous.
Usually it's a one-shot game.
Usually it's very clear that it's a one-shot game.
You will just never see that person.
You never even interact with that person.
It'll be clear whether it's public versus private,
and so on.
So usually in those games, things are extremely clear.
There is no strategic interactions, and so on.
All of these things are essentially shut down.
And then you can look at, randomly vary,
some of these characteristics and look at deviations of that.
So you're right.
In our game, in fact, you might sort of
think that, let's just be nice now,
in part, because the other person, maybe
I play with that person again.
And I wasn't really very precise about that either.
I think actually they're all like randomly allocated.
So in fact, that was not a consideration,
but it wasn't entirely clear.
Or for example, some people were selected,
and it happened to be that it was 50/50 selection.
That may have affected others in the class, and so on.
So a lot of these things were fairly sloppy
in terms of the actual implementation.
In the real games, that would be all shut down
and done much more carefully.
There were some other questions, I think?
No.
OK.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Was this just for the chocolate?
PROFESSOR: I think this is--
I looked at all of these.
The ultimatum games all looked very similar.
So this is, I think, for--
this is the money one.
But even for others, it looked fairly similar.
I'll show you some variation in the dictator
game in a second, where we have, like, do the stakes matter?
Does it matter whether it's private versus public?
Does it matter whether it's chocolate or money?
And perhaps, why might it matter?
We'll get back to that in a second.
Turns out, it does matter.
I'll say a little bit about that in a second.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So the fraction of rejection
in the green [INAUDIBLE] others, and then [INAUDIBLE]
is much higher.
The number of rejections in, like, $1 to $10
much higher than [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] explain the notion of fairness
or the equitable distribution of the pie you just mentioned,
because [INAUDIBLE] accept when they
are being given 90% of the pie, whereas they are just not
ready to accept [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right.
So that's a good point.
So you were saying earlier, maybe some people
have some issues about inequity or inequality across people.
So if that were the only explanation,
then you would rejections not only at, like,
if I give you $1, and I keep 9, but also if they give you $9,
and I keep 1.
So that means there's something else.
I think the fairness, people don't object to inequality.
If I say, OK, I'll give you a lot,
and you have more than I do, people don't object to that.
People object to, if I keep a lot and give you very little,
presumably because I'm selfish, and I'm not nice to you.
So that's kind of the sense of fairness.
So it's a fairness that goes beyond the outcomes.
So we're going to talk about this
for a bit, which is to say you could just look at the outcomes
and say, how much is the inequality of outcomes?
And I care about that.
But that doesn't seem to be the case.
What seems to be rather the case is
that people care about intentions
one way or the other.
It's like, what was I thinking, or was I a mean person when
I was doing this?
And if you get the sense that I was not very nice,
you might reject almost regardless of what
the outcome will be eventually.
And of course, you will reject less if it's
more costly for you to do so.
But perhaps it's also the case if I do, like, 70-30,
you might say, well, that's maybe not nice,
but it's also not that unfair either.
OK.
Right.
So now, one thing you can ask is how do these games
look like across countries?
And as I said, this game has been extensively played.
It's a game that like lots and lots of people
have played in all sorts of situations.
And the patterns are remarkably stable across countries.
And this is also the case-- like,
every time I play this in class, these patterns
look exactly the same.
So whether people are playing in Pittsburgh,
in Ljubljana, in Yogyakarta, Tokyo, play all essentially
the same way.
And even increasing people's stakes to, like, several months
pay by running essentially the experiment
with poorer populations, where you can pay,
essentially, days' or weeks' or even a month's pay,
people seem to play very similar across places?
Why is that?
It seems to be like somehow rejecting
becomes a lot more costly when I offer you,
like, a day's wage or the like.
But why do you think it looks fairly similar as well?
Why do people still reject?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: If your goal is to get back
at the other person, if the pool is just bigger,
then you're hurting them more by denying them.
PROFESSOR: Exactly.
So it's exactly as you said.
There's two things going on.
On the one hand, rejection becomes really expensive to me.
So if there's a month's wage, and you give me 10% of that
and keep 90% of that, rejecting 10% off a month's wage,
that's three or four days or whatever.
That's really costly for me to do.
However, it's also really mean of you to do that,
and I can really screw you over now
by sort of rejecting that offer.
So those things essentially seem to be more or less [INAUDIBLE]..
They go into opposite directions.
Empirically it seems to be that cancels each other out.
That's exactly right.
So now, there's a very interesting paper then
that does this ultimatum game in hunter-gatherer societies
and asks the question about, like, while it
seems to be that people behave fairly
similar in these games in industrialized societies--
whether they're relatively rich or not,
people seem to behave very similarly.
But perhaps if you look at hunter-gatherer society that
are quite different in various ways, perhaps
there we can look at interesting differences across places.
And so on the one hand, we see there's
lots of uniformity of play.
In lots of places, people seem to behave very similarly.
But there are some important differences.
And perhaps what this line of research is doing--
it's often called cultural economics--
is to try to see what is the role of culture.
And there's Nathan Nunn and other people at Harvard
are doing this in particular, inspired by Joe Henrich, who
is the leader of that, is trying to look at, like,
what is the role of culture in shaping people's preferences?
And so one thing they had done-- and at the time,
they looked at 15 different hunter-gatherer societies.
You can see them here on the map.
Some of them are in South America.
Some are in South America.
Some are in Africa.
And some are in Asia, Oceania.
And so you could look at these different societies.
And by looking at the way they are living and producing,
you can try to think about potential predictions of how
they might behave and social preferences behavior.
And there's two examples here that we have.
One is the society that you can see here, the Machiguenga,
which are, I guess, in--
which country is this?
AUDIENCE: Peru.
PROFESSOR: In Peru?
AUDIENCE: Peru.
PROFESSOR: Who are in Peru in Latin America.
You can see them.
They essentially are independent families.
They do a lot of cash cropping.
Their way of living appears to be slash-and-burn agriculture,
gathering food, fishing, and hunting.
So it's overall-- and you can correct me if that's wrong.
It seems to be fairly individualistic in the sense
of the way people produce.
Essentially, they live individualistically.
They are not really relying on a lot of cooperation
in the way they produce their food or their living.
In contrast, the Lamaleras in Indonesia,
these are whale hunters.
Essentially, when you try to hunt a whale--
I don't quite know.
I imagine, at least--
it requires lots of cooperation in the sense of,
like, people have to work together
by nature of essentially finding food or hunting these whales.
And so they on a daily basis are really relying on cooperation.
And so now this line of research by Henrich and others
is trying to see, by looking at people's way of living
and way of producing on any given life,
is that predictive of people's behavior in ultimatum games?
And what you see is the following.
I'll just show you what results are.
So the society in Peru, the slash-and-burn
horticulturalists, seem to have little concerns
for others outside of the family or for social status.
What you see essentially is relatively low offers.
Most of these offers are being accepted.
There's essentially very low rejection rates.
And that seems to be essentially--
and the rejections of amounts that are below 20%
is only, like, 1 out of 10.
So it seems to be the case, this society
that looks a lot more individualistic
is, in fact, much closer to perhaps the assumption,
the neoclassical assumptions of no social preferences mattering
in the sense of they seem to be--
in the way, at least, they play the ultimatum game,
they seem to be happy to offer low amounts,
and they seem to also be not upset or annoyed or getting
back to others who offer them low amounts.
In contrast, if you look at the Lamaleras,
the whale hunting culture based on strong and meticulously
detailed corporation, what you see is the mean offer is 57%,
or the mode is 50%.
There are quite a few rejections,
in particular, rejections of small amounts.
And that's to say, like, there's really an expectation
of people cooperating.
And if you don't cooperate, if you are not
playing by those kinds of rules, people
are being punished accordingly.
And there are some others.
There's sort of another culture of the Au/Gnau,
which is a culture where gift giving is an avenue to status
and gives the right to ask for reciprocity at any time.
So that's the thing that you often see in India as well,
that people tend to reject offers
that are very large in part because they
think that's inappropriate.
They think that's just a weird thing to do in a sense of,
like, I offer you, like, 50% or 60%,
they just think, like, if I accept this offer, now
I owe you something and have to give you stuff back.
You are nodding.
AUDIENCE: Oh, yes.
PROFESSOR: Yes.
So that's in India as well to some degree as far as--
yeah.
Any comments on this?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Is that last experiment anonymous?
Because if it's anonymous, then there's
no sense of this specific person [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: That's a great question.
I think it may not have been.
I need to check.
I think-- so there's some question on how closely in some
sense to the--
these are 15 societies.
So in some sense, these are not strictly
speaking statistical tests of, like,
does culture cause this behavior?
Because you only have essentially 15 observations
of certain ways people behave.
So in some sense, the mapping between the description
of what I was telling you, which surely
was inaccurate in terms of how people really
live in those societies, and their behavior
is more a descriptive mapping.
So in some ways, it could be that even if it were anonymous,
people behave in certain ways that reflects
a culture of cooperation is to say, it's just inappropriate--
or reflect, essentially, when they say,
if somebody gives you a large amount or a large gift,
you're not supposed to accept it.
You might sort of not accept it even in an anonymous game
because you feel bad about it afterwards
because you can't reciprocate, if that makes sense.
But I have to look it up, what the specific details were.
The paper is also-- and it's a very short paper.
So it's also on the course website if you want to look.
Any other comments?
Are you from Peru?
Do you know about the society?
Is that remotely accurate what I was saying?
AUDIENCE: I'm not really sure.
PROFESSOR: All right, well, you can look into this
and report back.
OK.
But anyway, it's a very interesting application
of the ultimatum game because it essentially tries to say,
we're trying to look at how do people
relate in the real world.
And looking at these different societies
gives you some sense of, like, it
does seem to capture something in the real world of how
people are, in fact, behaving.
OK.
So now we can sort think about what's
going on in ultimatum games.
And we talked about this a little bit,
but I want to be a little bit more precise.
It's like, why do responders reject low offers?
What's going on here?
What are people doing?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] spite.
PROFESSOR: Yes, and so the spite is--
so what exactly are you objecting to?
I asked this before, but let me ask again.
AUDIENCE: So I think a lot of things have already been said.
If you will reject, you think it's unfair, so much so
that you would rather that they get nothing,
you both get nothing, than [INAUDIBLE]
take this pity offer.
PROFESSOR: Right.
So there's two things.
Let me put them out here.
There's two things here.
You're talking about the second thing, I think,
which is the fairness part.
So one is about a procedural thing, which is to say,
I object to procedure.
I object to you not treating me nicely or fairly.
I'm just mad at you for doing that.
Therefore, I reject.
Hypothesis number one-- this is what
we were talking about earlier, which is to say,
I just dislike being behind.
You offer me-- you keep 6.
I have 4.
I just don't like having less than somebody else,
and I might reject that as well.
Can we disentangle those explanations?
From dictator game data?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: You can have some [INAUDIBLE]..
I guess, reject [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right.
So from the data that I just showed,
or from the pure, simple dictator game,
it's very hard to disentangle these
because it looks the same.
But what you're saying now is we can have different versions
of that where you could have either the computer implement
it, or you could choose for other people, and so on.
I think that's what you were saying.
And then from that, you could say, well,
if you're also rejecting that, then perhaps it's
not about the procedure per se.
If the computer chose 6 and 4 and you reject it anyway,
then it's not to do with fairness,
because the computer was perhaps just randomizing.
But it's rather to do with, like, I
don't like to have less than somebody else in the same game.
Right?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
So if you used a computer, you would
be able to [INAUDIBLE] just disliking [INAUDIBLE] less.
If you have an individual respond to [INAUDIBLE] accept
or reject an offer that somebody else made,
it's quite [INAUDIBLE]--
PROFESSOR: Right.
AUDIENCE: Then you would see whether they were just
trying to punish.
PROFESSOR: I see.
Yes, I see.
I see.
So yes, you can do that.
There's a bit of an issue, a little bit like--
another version of that would be just I don't like inequality,
but I just might want to--
I just really like 5-5 or over 50-50 outcomes.
There, I think we can look at what you were saying earlier,
which is to say I could see if there's a third party that
looks at somebody choosing 60 for themselves
and 40 for somebody else, versus somebody choosing 40
for themselves and 60 for somebody else.
If you really dislike inequality,
you would just reject both of those things.
And if you sort of instead think this
is like-- you dislike inequality.
If the person only does that for themselves in some selfish way,
you would only reject the 60-40, but not the 40-60.
Great.
Right.
So the answer is no, we cannot distinguish these motives based
on the ultimatum game.
So we need some additional evidence to do that.
We're going to do that mostly next time.
We're going to try to make some progress towards that.
Now, if you now think about the proposer's motive--
if a proposer gives a large or a small amount, what can
we learn from that?
Or why is it difficult to figure out what the proposal is doing?
If you see somebody gives a large amount of money,
what have you learned from that?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: It could be that they're just being optimistic,
or it could be that they have beliefs about what
the responder would reject versus what the responder would
not reject.
And they could reject [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: Exactly.
So it could be that I'm just trying to be nice.
I'm trying to be friendly.
I care about you.
I offer you a 50-50 because I want you to have half.
Or it could be that I just actually
don't care about you at all.
I just think if I offer you only 30 or 20
or whatever, there's a good chance
that you might reject it.
Therefore, I just optimize over my--
so it depends on my beliefs about what
the rejection rates are.
And if the beliefs are that below 30% or 40% people's
rejection rates are positive and sort of higher,
I might essentially just maximize depending on my risk
preferences or whatever.
Suppose I'm risk-neutral.
I might just maximize expected payout.
It might be that essentially 40% or 50%
is just the optimal solution to that maximization problem,
and I just don't care about you whatsoever.
So if I'm looking at this behavior essentially,
if I'm looking at an ultimatum game
and looking at a proposer offering large amounts
or positive amounts, you can learn nothing about their--
or it's very hard to learn anything
about their social preferences, because essentially there's
strategic motives potentially involved as well.
Is that clear?
Or any questions?
So what do we need to do then?
Well, now we need to sort of have some other evidence.
So we talked about this already.
When you think about social preferences,
you can think about three broad categories of preferences.
And we're going to talk about this a lot more.
So one is distributional preferences.
This is to say that you care about outcomes.
You care about how much each person gets.
So that's to say we can sort of represent this to,
like, I put some weight on my utility, on my outcomes.
I put some weight on your outcomes.
And then depending on what that weight is,
I'm going to decide about how to distribute outcomes.
These are sort of distributional preferences.
Then there are things like what we
want to call face-saving concerns, which
is people don't want to look bad in front of others.
You can also think about this like social image, which
is to say, I want to look like I'm a nice guy.
So in particular, if I'm in public making certain choices,
if I'm being observed, I'm going to behave
in a very friendly way.
If I could secretly be mean, I would do that.
But as long as my social image is at stake,
I might look like a nice person.
We're going to talk about some experimental evidence looking
at that.
And then there's some which we want call
intentions-based preferences.
These are things like reciprocity,
procedural justice, and other facets of social preferences.
Broadly speaking, you can think of this
as fairness, which is to say people don't care
about the outcomes, per se.
They care about essentially the process in which
the outcomes were generated.
So they might be perfectly happy with one person getting
a lot and another person getting nothing as
long as the computer randomized and [INAUDIBLE],,
the probability of getting money was the same for everybody.
So that would be somebody who said--
these would be intention-based preferences, where people say,
this is procedural justice.
This is a fair thing to do.
And people are motivated by that,
or essentially, they might reciprocate.
In cases when they think things are unfair,
they might not do so in case they
think things are fairly generated, even
if things are unequal ex-post.
OK.
So now we're going to talk about all three of those.
So let's start with distributional preferences.
This is, again, the simplest kinds of social preferences.
This is very much a natural extension
of how economists think about the world.
This is going back to Gary Becker,
I think, in the '60s, where essentially, instead of saying,
does a utility function that just has my own outcomes,
as my own consumption as an argument,
instead, have a utility function that has my own utility,
how much I get, a function of that,
plus how much does the other person
get, and a weight on that other person.
And so again, we sort of look at,
like, the person cares not about only how much they get,
but also the other.
There's two versions of that, and this is
what you were saying earlier.
There are interested distributional preferences
and disinterested distributional preferences.
The interested one is essentially--
the version is, like, where I'm involved,
and I get a certain outcome, and there's
another person involved, and I put some weight
on that other person.
So it's about me versus another person,
and how these resources are being divided.
Could be also multiple people, of course.
And then there's a disinterested part,
which is to say, how do I want resources
to be divided across others?
This is questions like, how do we want society to look?
How do people feel about inequality and the like?
Or, like what public goods-- how much should the government
engage in redistribution and so on?
These would be often--
to some degree, of course, it's interested
because people have to pay taxes or receive benefits
from the government.
But often, it's you can ask questions
people have opinions about.
Suppose you live in the US.
You could have opinions about how should Europe's tax system
look like.
What is fair and what is unfair?
Those would be, essentially, disinterested distributional
preferences?
Any questions on that?
So we're going to start with this
and see how far can you get distributional preferences.
What kinds of things can be explained?
And then we're going to move towards saving
face or social image type of concerns.
So the dictator game, I already explained to you
what it looks like.
So here's what the dictator game looked like in class
with no stakes.
This is very typical to how people
behave in the real world.
What do we see here?
What are patterns of behaviors?
This is no stakes, and it's just hypothetical questions here.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: There are two large groups.
One group that doesn't give anything,
and a group that gives half.
PROFESSOR: Exactly.
And this is very typical, again, in many situations.
There's a group of people, often,
like, 30%, 40% of people who just essentially keep
the money.
There's a group of people that thinks
50-50 is the right thing to do.
That's often also something, like, 30% of people.
And then there's people often in between,
often between 0 and 50.
And there are some people who tend to give a lot.
That's often a minority of people.
Now, what can we infer from those choices?
What can we infer from people who choose 0?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: They give themselves [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: And do we have any objections to that?
Or what other interpretation could we have?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: In the case of money, we can't necessarily
assume they're self-interested, I guess,
because they could be giving it to charity.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, exactly.
So in the case of money, you could keep the money.
You could say, I'm choosing the $10.
And instead, I'm giving it to somebody
who is in higher need, who has higher
marginal value of this money.
That could be you could give it to charity
or give it to somebody on the street or any other person
you think is in need.
So that person who looks like they're fairly selfish
might, in fact, be quite generous in the sense
of giving the money to others.
That's a common issue with a lot of these games,
is essentially it's often an outside option in a sense of,
like, we can look at these games as if this is the only game.
That's the only thing that's happening
in the world, and nothing else, and look at--
try to explain behavior through that.
But often the issue is there's other things that
happen in the world.
So when I think about, am I behind,
or do I get more money versus somebody else, when
you play with somebody who is a lot richer or a lot poorer
than you are, in fact, giving them $10 versus not or $5
or not or will not change that fact that you're
a lot richer than they are.
So perhaps you should give a lot more, a lot less money,
and so on.
So in anything that we're assuming,
we look at this through the lens of,
like, there's only this game that happens, and nothing else.
It turns out that's actually a pretty good approximation.
People sort of, what we call, are narrowly framed.
They look at essentially this game
as if this is completely separate from anything
else in the world.
So people tend to not integrate these games
with the rest of life or the rest of utility.
So expected utilities would say, you
should integrate this game with everything else
that happens in life.
So you should not look at, like, 6 versus 4.
I'm earning more than somebody else.
You should look at, like, what is my income overall,
a lifetime income?
What is your lifetime income or the expected lifetime
income of somebody else in the experiment?
And depending on that, you should give money or not.
Or differently, you might say, well,
should I give money to somebody else in class?
Well, perhaps not because most people in class
will eventually make a lot of money once they graduate.
And instead, let's just use that money
and give it to somebody else who has higher need of that.
OK.
So here's no stakes.
It turns out when you look at stakes, not much happens.
So this is answers-- if you look at-- this is no stakes.
Here's stakes.
Answers look, in fact, very similar.
There's not much of a difference.
Even when you have higher stakes--
I think this is, like, $20, and the like-- people
seem to behave very similarly.
So it seems to be, in fact, asking hypothetical questions--
and this is how some of these games
started, just asking hypothetically,
what would you do if somebody gave you $10 and so on?
Turns out, you actually get pretty good answers
for how people behave in reality.
That's true for this class, but that's also
true in actual experiments.
In actual experiments, if you just ask people,
like, what would you do?
And then when you actually implement it
with the same people or with other people,
you get actually pretty similar patterns across people.
Now, we do find that--
so we had a version of that that was essentially
in private, which is to say you did not
have to reveal if selected to the entire class,
essentially, what you chose, but only to the other person.
Notice that that's not really private in the sense of you
still have to tell the other person, ha, I chose 10,
and you get 0, so that's not very nice.
There's other versions that would be in private,
would just be the other person might never find out,
or the other person might at least never find out
that it was you who chose 10, and they got 0.
And so but what we do see, if you look at--
I think this is with monetary stakes.
This is with $10.
This is with $10 in private.
And you do see, for example, that when
you look at the fraction who gives essentially 100%,
that fraction tends to go down.
So it looks like people are somewhat less nice in private.
We're going to get back to that again
in the sense of trying to see-- when we look
at the question of, are people really nice
when they give money, and so on.
We're going to look at cleaner versions of that, where people
have the ability to essentially hide in some ways
that they're not nice.
How might one do that?
How could you-- what kind of game would you
design to hide the fact that the person is not nice?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: For example, if the recipient
is only given the money and not told
what percentage of the original money [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: Right.
So one version of that would be the recipient just
doesn't even know what the game is.
They just get some money.
Here's some money for whatever reason.
You were just given it because you're in the experiment.
And so you could just essentially hide
the entire game from the recipient.
What's another thing you could do
where you don't hide the entire game but sort of say,
still, there's a game?
But what other ways could you--
in what other ways could you hide the fact
that people are not nice?
What mechanisms could you implement?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: If you mix robots and [INAUDIBLE] people.
PROFESSOR: Exactly.
And that's exactly--
I'm going to show you that, I think, on Wednesday.
That's exactly what people have done, where are you say,
with 50% chance there's a robot who is not very nice or very
nice or whatever, and some chance the robot
is really mean, with some chance the robot is really nice.
And now we can look at--
so with 50%, the robot decides.
With 50% chance, you decide.
And the recipient will never know whether it
was a robot versus you.
And so now you can essentially hide behind the robot.
You can say, well, I really wanted to give you a lot.
But sorry, the robot was really mean.
Too bad.
And the other person will never find out.
And it turns out when you do that kind of game, people
tend to be a lot less nice than when there's no robot.
OK.
So then we have chocolate.
Looks like people are giving somewhat more
when it comes to chocolate.
They tend to give a lot more when it comes to apples.
So now, why is that?
Why does that matter?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: If you model algorithms, your utility
plus the other person's utility [INAUDIBLE],,
it could be that people with marginal utility,
in chocolate apples decline more than [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: Yes.
It turns out getting the fifth or sixth or seventh apple
of the day, maybe not as enjoyable
as the first or second.
So exactly.
So well, it's really reasonable to think
that the marginal utility of money
is linear for small amounts.
If I give you $1, 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, in some sense,
that shouldn't be very concave.
We discussed that at length.
For apples, they're perishable.
There's only so many apples you can eat on a given day.
So really what we should look at is, like, what's
the utility of apples?
And if the marginal utility of apples is decreasing,
that might matter quite a bit.
OK.
So maybe let me summarize a little bit.
What did we learn in those kinds of games?
So first is people look fairly generous in dictator games,
even when the game is largely private.
We're going to challenge that assumption a little bit more,
exactly as you suggested, with other ways in which
either people can be more private, they can just
hide the game entirely, or when they perhaps
can hide behind a machine or a computer or in other ways,
or when they perhaps can opt out of the game in certain ways.
People generally seem to give something
like 30% of the total.
That's quite common.
20% to 30% is quite common overall.
It doesn't seem to matter that much whether there's
hypothetical versus actual choices.
The size of the stakes also seem not to matter that much.
We seem to see somewhat different behaviors
of chocolates and apples.
There's also some people who told me that they're
lactose intolerant and so on.
So essentially saying, like, their marginal utility
of chocolate is quite low.
So it's much easier-- it's much less costly to give
to somebody else.
Or put differently, it's actually efficient potentially
because the marginal utility of chocolate
is much higher for that other person than it is for you.
Of course, there's a problem now, again,
that you could just choose the chocolates for yourself
and then just give it to your friends.
So you look quite selfish, but in fact, you might not be.
So anyway, but sort of what really matters here--
and this is perhaps--
in some sense, when we talk about apples and chocolates,
it's a little bit silly.
But when you think about a dictator game
where you play with somebody in Kenya whose income or lifetime
income is, like, orders of magnitude lower than yours,
then it matters, actually, quite a bit
what's the marginal utility of the $10 that you
could keep for yourself versus for that person.
For that person, that's a lot of money.
For you, a lot less.
And so you might be more generous
when playing with a person whose marginal utility of money
or consumption is a lot higher.
This is what I was mentioning as well.
You want to think about, what is the outside option?
So some people might give low amount
and decide to give the money or the apples
or whatever to somebody else.
Those people will look selfish in dictator games,
while, in fact, they're quite generous.
That's a problem with these games
that are hard to deal with.
We're not going to be able to deal with that overall.
You can think about it a little bit and sort of see.
Can we give people options to opt out and so on?
But it will always be an issue.
It's less of an issue than you perhaps think about it.
Conceptually, that's a huge problem.
But when we look at people's actual behavior,
it looks like people really behave as if this was
the only thing in the world.
And then, in some ways, it's quite predictive
of actual behavior in the world, even perhaps, in some ways,
it shouldn't be.
Any other comments or things we learned perhaps from the game
or that you observed?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Is there a possibility that the people that give 0,
it's just that they're interested distribution
[INAUDIBLE] is the same as your disinterested one,
and they actually think, like, oh, the best thing for society
is for me to have those $10 and not the other person?
PROFESSOR: So because you put a lot of weight on yourself or?
AUDIENCE: Sort of like, regardless
if it's correct or not, but you think
that the way you'll use these $10
is better for society than the other person?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, I think you have to justify that somehow
in the sense of, like, if you are very
similar to the other students, then you might sort of
think that dividing it--
so depends what do you think is the marginal utility of money.
So if you think the marginal utility of money
is essentially the same for everybody, in some sense then,
it doesn't matter very much whether you keep it
to yourself versus somebody else,
in some sense because, in the grand scheme of things,
it doesn't look very different.
It could be that, for example, you think, for whatever reason,
you just really had a bad day, and you can use the $10
to buy something nice.
It could be that you think you're relatively
poor to others in class.
For whatever reason, you just don't have a lot of money
right now.
The marginal utility of money for you might be really high.
So again, and in some sense, that's socially efficient.
You would actually-- even if it weren't you,
you would give the money to yourself.
Now, I think it is the case that when
you look at these distributions, it
tends to be that 30% of people keep all of that money.
So it tends to be that it's hard to believe that that's really--
I mean, you'd have to look at, like, how does that correlate
with other characteristics?
It probably does, and we'll get back
to that in the sense of when we see now,
when people have the chance to hide money and so on, when
you see now the fraction of people who choose
$10 for themselves and 0 for others
goes up, that, in some ways, compared to when you can't
hide, that perhaps is an identifying selfishness and so
on.
Here, when you see people keeping 10,
you can come up with lots of explanations, including
the one that you mentioned, but also including the ones you
keep it for yourself and then give it to your friends
and share it with them and so on.
And we can't really infer very much.
But in these cleaner experiments,
where you can really say, OK, when
you don't have the outside option, when
you don't have the chance to hide, you look quite nice.
That goes away when you have the chance to hide.
Presumably, that is because you just are selfish and not
for other reasons.
OK.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Have people looked at if things
change if you actually get the money
or get the apples beforehand?
Like, [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Surely they-- surely they have.
What I don't know-- so surely [INAUDIBLE]..
So [INAUDIBLE] is very robust in various situations.
So my guess is they were less likely to give.
I don't have--
I can look it up, but I don't have like a great experiment
that I can tell you about.
But my sense is that--
so the question is, if you give people the $10 into their hand,
are they going to choose differently?
My guess is they will look a lot less selfish.
In the experiment that you played, in some sense
you are sort of endowed with a game.
So in some ways--
but you could do deviation of that.
You could look at, like, here's $10.
It's neither yours nor the other person's.
How would you like to divide it?
My guess is that person will be more generous when
they do that compared to saying, like, here's $10.
They give it to you in $1 bills, and now you
have to give me back some.
People will be more likely to keep the money when
they actually have the money in hand, when they feel like it's
yours or theirs, as opposed to have
to divide money that doesn't really belong to any person.
So my guess is that's true, but I don't--
there's literally thousands of experiments of people doing
these kinds of variations.
So I'm sure there is somebody who has done this.
I can look up and see whether I find that.
OK.
Any other thoughts of what we learned?
OK.
So when you now think about how should you
model these distributional preferences--
and there's a classic paper by Charness and Rabin.
Rabin is the guy that you know from the calibration
theorem about risk preferences.
And the way their model is very simple.
They essentially have the preferences
over outcomes x1 and x2.
Think of this as money.
It could be also apples or something else.
Money is perhaps a better approximation
because the marginal utility of money--
think of this as rather constant.
And now player 2 is the dictator.
So x2 is how much player 2 gets.
So player 2 has a utility function u2.
The utility of player 2 has a function of x1.
This is how much the other person gets, and x2,
how much the player 2 gets.
And the utility function looks like rho times
x1 plus 1 minus rho times x2.
If x2 is larger or equal than x1--
that is to say that the person is ahead,
if x2 gets more than x1--
and it's sigma times x1 plus 1 minus sigma x2
if x2 is smaller or equal than x1.
So what do these parameters measure?
What a rho and sigma measure here?
Why might they be different?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: How nice they are?
PROFESSOR: Yes, exactly.
What does it do?
How much weight do you put on yourself or the other person?
AUDIENCE: So if it's a lower value,
then you don't really care about the other person,
so you put more weight on yourself.
PROFESSOR: Right.
So in the extreme case--
I guess, in one case, I guess, if you choose--
if this is 0, then essentially, you're
back in the neoclassical case of not caring about others at all.
So if you choose, like, rho sigma equals 0, then it's just,
like, how much do you get?
You should get 0, and you should accept any offer, right?
And now as rho and sigma goes up, 0.5 or whatever,
you give more weight on the other person.
So 0.5, for example, is the case where
you care equally about the other person and yourself, right?
Because the weights are then the same.
Now, why might rho and sigma be different?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So probably rho is larger than sigma.
PROFESSOR: And why is that?
AUDIENCE: So if you're person 2 and you already
know you're getting more than the other person,
then you don't feel such a need to do so much--
you don't feel a need to have so much more than them.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, exactly.
It's just easier.
That seems to be a very intuitive feature of the world.
It seems to be much easier to be generous
when you're ahead anyway.
If you're very rich, you might as well
give some money to the poorer person, and so on.
If you are poorer than the other person,
it's much harder to be generous in some ways,
perhaps because you feel like you deserve
to get as much as the other person,
so why would you give the other person more?
You put essentially less weight on that other person
if you're behind.
What's the case of sigma smaller than 0?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Would it be then the person
who want to hurt the other person,
so then they put more weight on decreasing their value?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, exactly.
So if you're behind-- so it's the case where you are behind,
you're the x2, the player 2.
If player 2 is behind, has less than player 1.
Now, you might get positive utility
from reducing player 1's outcome.
So if you're behind, you'd rather
have the other person get less, and you'll feel better
about that, presumably because you're then less behind, even
holding constant your own outcomes.
So if you keep your own outcome, your own payment,
the same-- suppose you get 5.
The other person gets 20--
you feel better if the other person
gets 15 or 10 because you're less behind now
than the other person.
OK, so you're willing to hurt the other person.
You might be even willing to pay to hurt the other person, which
is kind of what happens in the dictator game
when the person rejects the dictator game.
Any questions on that?
So I have an example of sigma smaller than 1.
Suppose you have sigma being minus 1/3.
You have to choose between 0, 0 and 9, 1.
What are you going to choose?
So this is what this looks like, sigma times
x1 plus 1 minus sigma x2.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: You choose 0, 0.
PROFESSOR: And why is that?
AUDIENCE: Because it multiplies the other numbers.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Right, so essentially-- the reason
is that essentially, if you look at this situation,
and you put minus 1/3 weight, essentially,
on the other person.
So you really don't like the other person getting 9.
So you're really unhappy about that.
Despite the fact that you value getting some money yourself--
you have positive value on that as well.
It's, I guess, 4/3 times 1.
But sort of putting together, that's negative.
So essentially, you're willing to pay--
and this is, I guess, one explanation potentially
why people might reject.
And this is, I guess, what I was saying earlier.
You might reject the ultimatum game simply
for distributional reasons.
You might just say, I don't like being behind in this game.
If I'm behind, I put negative weight on this other person,
and then I'm now rejecting it because I
feel happier if the person who is in front of me gets less,
even if that comes at the cost of me having to pay some money.
Now, notice, you are not going to reject all unequal offers.
So I think 6-4, you would probably accept.
But you will reject really uneven offers.
So in some sense, if I ask you questions using the strategy
method, as we did--
if I asked you questions about at what threshold
would you reject an offer, I can essentially--
if I assume that your preferences look like this,
I can back out, essentially, your sigma.
Questions on that?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: What's the utility [INAUDIBLE]
for the dictator, not the person who gets to reject the offer?
PROFESSOR: Sorry, this is just-- sorry,
I should have been clearer.
So this could be for--
these are preferences that are generic for any types of games
that are being played.
So you could apply this to any game.
So Charness and Rabin, essentially what they do
is-- in their paper, and it's a long paper
that covers a lot of ground.
But essentially, what they're saying is,
like, here's what distributional preferences might look like.
And you can then choose different parameters.
And then the question is, like, what kinds of behavior now
can we explain?
Being the dictator game, potentially you
can try to explain sort of people's behavior.
But not I'm trying to apply it to the ultimatum game.
Or you could also apply it to the trust game
and say, for what kinds of behavior,
what kinds of preferences might people do certain behavior?
So what kinds of behaviors can be explained with that?
So now what's the experimental evidence on rho and sigma?
Just to remind you, rho is the parameter,
the weight that you put on the other person if you're ahead.
Sigma is the parameter on the other person when you're behind
in a situation.
So we think that when people are ahead,
most people seem to have a positive rho.
So people usually tend to--
when ahead, they're willing to sacrifice some money
to increase the other person's payout.
So this is essentially-- when you think about dictator games,
when they have 10, essentially you
think of this as being, like, 10-0, you're ahead.
So you're willing to sacrifice at least some money, like 7-3
or 6-4, even 5-5.
You like that better.
You're happy to give the other person some amount.
A minority are even willing to sacrifice money
to give the other person an equal amount of money
or even less--
sorry, even more.
When deciding to split $10, subjects
tend to give about 20% to 25% on average.
In class, that was actually pretty close.
The 28%, I think, are about the $10 amount.
You guys gave it something like 28%.
That's actually pretty close to what people would
do in normal dictator games.
The estimated rho tends to be about 0.4.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: How can rho be estimated from the dictator
game?
The linearity of the preferences here,
shouldn't it predict that player 2 will always
either give 0 or give 50%?
PROFESSOR: No, it's just to say--
I think this is just to say you have the same marginal utility
than I have.
So depending on when I ask you, like, how much do you
give, that pins down your rho.
AUDIENCE: But if x1 is 10 minus x2,
and we want to maximize rho x1 plus 1 minus rho times
x2, and you're maximizing that over x2.
[INAUDIBLE] equation, shouldn't it be [INAUDIBLE]??
PROFESSOR: No, no, but the unknown here is the rho.
It's essentially to say, for example, you
choose 6-4, that means you prefer 6-4 over 7-3,
and you prefer 6-4 over 5-5.
And those two inequalities essentially
give you a bound on rho.
We can talk afterwards, but I'm pretty sure that's true.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's essentially just saying, like, essentially
what you do is you have--
since you chose a certain option,
now essentially you'd prefer not to choose a higher option.
You prefer not to choose a lower option.
When you write that down, that should give you
inequalities as a function of rho in this case.
But we'll talk about it in two minutes.
What's the experimental evidence of sigma?
Only about 10% to 20% of players have sigma strong enough
to pay a non-trivial amount to hurt the other player.
These are people essentially who reject offers.
About 30% of people will sacrifice
to help a player ahead of them.
So even if they're behind and have the option of, like,
can you sort of help the person in front of you, 30% of people
will do that.
If a person is behind you, often neither
wants to help or hurt the other person by much.
Essentially, sort of like, whatever, I don't
care about this other person.
I don't feel inclined to do very much.
But also, I'm not necessarily hurting them.
And now I want to just preview what
we're going to talk about next time, which
is to say it looks like people are pretty
nice in various situations.
It looks like in the dictator game, they give money.
It looks like in the ultimatum game,
they give money, and so on.
Looks like people give money to charity.
This is what we discussed earlier about 2% of GDP.
People also do a bunch of volunteering or other
contributions.
So they give some time, about 15 hours per month on average
when you do surveys.
So it looks like people seem fairly generous overall.
Now, when you think about social recognition or social image,
perhaps that picture gets less rosy overall.
It seems to be that essentially, people
care a lot about what others think of them, and not just
about the outcomes, per se.
So one example would be gifts to organizations.
If you look at thresholds of-- like,
when you look at the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
and you look at the distribution of people giving,
it tends to be there's these thresholds where
you can give a certain amount, and then you recognize them.
Like, when you go to the Boston Symphony, in this booklet,
you can who's like a certain donor of which category.
People tend to bunch just above the thresholds
for these categories.
And presumably, that's because they want to look good.
That's just one example.
So I think the next question we're going to ask on Wednesday
is to say, is social recognition a major motivation for giving?
So people seem to not only care about what others get,
but what others think of them when they give or not.
So in some ways, that's a philosophical discussion
in saying, like, are people really nice versus not?
And you might say, it's sort of disappointing
if they're not nice in certain situations compared to others.
The flip side of that is, well, if you
know what kinds of situations generate
altruistic or prosocial behavior, well,
if you know that, then you can essentially also create
situations to foster prosociality.
So once we kind of know under which structure
or in which kind of circumstances
people are nice, well, that gives us
some lever or some ways for policy and saying, like,
well, you have to design your institutions
or your organizations or your company in certain ways
to get people to behave nice to each other.
In contrast, if you thought people
are either generally nice or not, well, then in some sense,
that's good to know.
But then in some sense, we can't do very much about that.
And that's what we're going to talk about next time.
Thank you.