Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitivemarkets butnot inbilateral bargainingsituations. Thereisalsostrong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperation is maintained, although punishment is costly for those who punish. This paper asks whether there is a simple common principle that can explain this puzzling evidence. We show that if some people care about equity the puzzles can be resolved. It turns out that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selesh types dominate equilibrium behavior.

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A theory of fairness, competition and cooperation

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperation is maintained although punishment is costly for those who punish. This paper asks whether there is a simple common principle that can explain this puzzling evidence. We show that if a fraction of the people exhibits inequality aversion the puzzles can be resolved.

/pdf/a-theory-of-fairness-competition-and-cooperation-445axsa22c.pdf

A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

/pdf/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-480wr4m3kb.pdf

The WEIRDest People in the World

We demonstrate that a simple model, constructed on the premise that people are motivated by both their pecuniary payoff and their relative payoff standing, organizes a large and seemingly disparate set of laboratory observations as one consistent pattern The model is incomplete information but nevertheless posed entirely in terms of directly observable variables The model explains observations from games where equity is thought to be a factor, such as ultimatum and dictator, games where reciprocity is thought to play a role, such as the prisoner's dilemma and gift exchange, and games where competitive behavior is observed, such as Bertrand markets (JEL C78, C90, D63, D64, H41)

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ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition

Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History

Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

/pdf/social-distance-and-other-regarding-behavior-in-dictator-53pm2ibt3z.pdf

Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: Reply

A surprisingly large amount of otherregarding behavior is the common finding of experiments on bargaining, public goods, and trust. Elizabeth Hoffman et al. ( hereafter, HMS ) ( 1996 ) have provided an insightful analysis of why experimental results deviate from game theoretic predictions in dictator games. The authors conclude that individuals’ dispositional knowledge about social norms and reciprocity is activated by decreasing social distance even though the dictator game explicitly excludes reciprocal sanctioning possibilities by experimental design. We challenge this conclusion. While HMS (p. 654) define social distance to be ‘‘the degree of reciprocity that subjects believe exist within a social interaction,’’ we argue that social distance influences otherregardedness independent of any norms of social exchange. When social distance decreases, the ‘‘other’’ is no longer some unknown individual from some anonymous crowd but becomes an ‘‘identifiable victim’’ (Thomas C. Schelling 1968). In order to discriminate between reciprocity-based and identifiabilitybased other-regardedness, we also used the dictator game and varied the degree of social distance. An anonymous treatment is com-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/116994.pdf

Social distance and other-regarding behavior in dictator games

Cooperation between individuals requires the ability to infer each other's mental states to form shared expectations over mutual gains and make cooperative choices that realize these gains. From evidence that the ability for mental state attribution involves the use of prefrontal cortex, we hypothesize that this area is involved in integrating theory-of-mind processing with cooperative actions. We report data from a functional MRI experiment designed to test this hypothesis. Subjects in a scanner played standard two-person “trust and reciprocity” games with both human and computer counterparts for cash rewards. Behavioral data shows that seven subjects consistently attempted cooperation with their human counterpart. Within this group prefrontal regions are more active when subjects are playing a human than when they are playing a computer following a fixed (and known) probabilistic strategy. Within the group of five noncooperators, there are no significant differences in prefrontal activation between computer and human conditions.

/pdf/a-functional-imaging-study-of-cooperation-in-two-person-46vdardzv4.pdf

Kevin McCabe

Papers

Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History

Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: Reply

Social distance and other-regarding behavior in dictator games

A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange