Well there’s not much else on at the moment so let me tell you about a study I recently took part in, which I think it’s OK to talk about a little now in general terms (with some of the bits omitted) because I’ve just been paid off. You fill out forms saying what you would do and then are randomly paired up with someone else, and there’s about £25 to be won in total.
To my knowledge there hasn’t been a gameshow based around the Ultimatum Game (maybe Divided as a variant), one of the games that form part of economic game theory.
In this game there is a resource, lets say 100 units. Person A proposes how it should be split. Person B decides to accept or reject the offer. If they accept, both get paid off how A split it. If B rejects, both go empty handed. There’s an added wrinkle in this particular experiment in that in some games if B rejects, A gets a small amount of money anyway (about one-sixth of what’s on offer).
As Player B you have both none of the power and all the power – in theory you can veto anything not shared equally, but by the same token leaving with *something* is better and more rational than leaving with *nothing*. In theory A can push quite hard with this knowledge, especially as in some instances they stand to make money regardless. The question is how far are you willing to roll over and take it?
As it turned out as a Player B I was pretty happy to suck it up – up to a point, expecting that I should be better off than Player A would be if he was worst off (i.e. I want more than zero, and a little bit more than what they’d get in games with a consolation prize).
Happily it turns out that I was paired up with someone pretty generous and I won about £11. My first thought was “oh that’s quite nice!” My second thought was “what a sucker, they should have had a lot more.”
Anyway that was a lot of fun, and to top it all off I appeared to have wangled myself a free coleslaw getting KFC on the way home. When you’re up you’re up.
