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How does voice matter? Evidence from the ultimatum game

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Abstract

Prior research has demonstrated that the ability to express one’s views or “voice” matters in social and economic interactions, but little is known of the mechanisms through which voice operates. Using an experimental approach based on the ultimatum game with the strategy method, we explore four potential channels for voice that encompass and expand on prior work: the knowledge effect of voice, the value expressive (or inherent value) of voice, the expectation effect of voice, and the procedural fairness effects of voice. Our results show strong effects through the value expressive and expectation channel, but not through either the knowledge channel or procedural fairness. In our view, voice is powerful because people like to express their views and they are disappointed when their views did not make a difference in their outcomes.

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Notes

  1. To test the sensitivity of our findings, we adopted a more stringent criterion to determine the highest ranked category for each message. A message was classified under a category only if there was more than 75% of the agreement among message evaluators. With this criterion, we found that “fairness” was still the leading motivation behind most messages. 59% of the responders in the voice treatment and 52% of the responders from the VE treatment wrote messages to express fairness.

  2. Another way of showing that intention matters is by comparing the MAOs of responders who requested a fair offer but instead were given a low offer with the MAOs of responders who did not request a fair offer and were given a low offer. If intention matters, the MAOs of the former should be higher than the MAOs of the latter. This is because the low offer made by proposers might be labeled as something that is more negative when responders requested a fair offer than when they did not request it. Unfortunately, we do not have enough observations of these two groups of responders to make a meaningful statistical comparison.

  3. Proposers in no voice treatment and voice to experimenter treatment received the same instructions, which is that their matched responders were not randomly selected to send a message to them regarding their desired offers.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jack Knetsch, Daniel Houser and seminar participants at George Mason University for their helpful comments and suggestions, and Wu Jun for excellent research assistance. We also acknowledge financial support from Nanyang Technological University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Nanyang Technological University, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637332, Singapore

    Qiyan Ong & Yohanes E. Riyanto

  2. Economic Growth Centre, Nanyang Technological University, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore, 637332, Singapore

    Qiyan Ong

  3. Murphy Institute, Tulane University, 108 Tilton Hall, New Orleans, LA, 70115, USA

    Steven M. Sheffrin

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  1. Qiyan Ong
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  2. Yohanes E. Riyanto
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  3. Steven M. Sheffrin
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Correspondence to Steven M. Sheffrin.

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Ong, Q., Riyanto, Y.E. & Sheffrin, S.M. How does voice matter? Evidence from the ultimatum game. Exp Econ 15, 604–621 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9316-x

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