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Fairness is intuitive

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Abstract

In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust to controls that take account of the fact that response time might be affected by the decision-maker’s cognitive ability and swiftness. The experiment was conducted with a large and heterogeneous sample recruited from the general population in Denmark. We find a striking similarity in the association between response time and fair behavior across groups in the society, which suggests that the predisposition to act fairly is a general human trait.

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Notes

  1. See also Spilopoulos and Ortmann (2015) for a survey of the literature on response time.

  2. See also Rand et al. (2014) for a meta-study.

  3. Two previous studies of response time and fair behavior have employed the dictator game, but these conducted either a non-incentivized experiment (Rubinstein 2004) or a non-standard dictator game with a fairly complex decision problem (Piovesan and Wengström 2009).

  4. The simplicity of the dictator game also reduces the role of noise in the decision making process. See Recalde et al. (2014) for a study of how noise may matter when interpreting response time in complex decision problems.

  5. For further details on the iLEE online platform, see http://www.econ.ku.dk/cee/ilee/.

  6. 1565 participants took part in the dictator game, but background information is lacking for 57 participants. Our main analysis is therefore conducted on the 1508 participants for which we have both experimental data and background data. In the Online Appendix, Figure A.4, we show that the association between response time and fairness is robust to the inclusion of the 57 participants for whom background information is missing.

  7. The translated instructions to the experiment are provided in the Online Appendix, Section A.1.

  8. It should be noted that most studies measure response time in the lab, while the present study and Rubinstein (2007) measure it using an online platform. An online experiment allows for less control than a lab experiment, which may lead to both shorter response times (participants may be more inclined to click quickly through the experiment) and longer response times (participants may be more distracted by other activities).

  9. We did not enforce time restrictions in our experiment. This means that the distribution of response time in the experiment is heavily skewed to the right. Since more than 90 % of the subjects submitted their decision within two minutes, however, we top-code the response time at 120 sec. In the Online Appendix, Section A.2, we show that our results are robust to top-coding at 60 or 240 sec.

  10. This is in line with what has been observed in recent studies comparing students and non-students in the dictator game. In a lab experiment conducted with a sample of participants that is nationally representative for the adult population in Norway and two students samples, Cappelen et al. (forthcoming) find that the representative population give away significantly more than the students (41.2 versus 27.1 %); similarly, (Belot et al. 2015) find that students give away much less than non-students in a in a study carried out in the Nuffield CESS lab in Oxford (35 versus 16 %).

  11. The median response times are lower than the average response times because the distribution of response time is skewed to the right.

  12. In the Online Appendix, Section A.2, we show that the results also hold for Tobit regressions.

  13. Thus, we do not find, as in Evans et al. (forthcoming), that extreme responses in general are faster than intermediate responses. An OLS regression of response time for all participant is included in the appendix.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from comments made by David G. Rand and seminar participants at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics and the University of Copenhagen. We are grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation for providing financial support and to Statistics Denmark for collaboration. The project has also received financial support from the Research Council of Norway (Grant No. 202484) and the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation. We also acknowledge the assistance received from Toke Fosgaard, Eva Gregersen, Lars Gårn Hansen, Nikolaos Korfiatis, Ditte Mørup, Louise Skouby, Anja Skadkær Møller, and Thomas A. Stephens.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Helleveien 30, 5045, Bergen, Norway

    Alexander W. Cappelen & Bertil Tungodden

  2. Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, building 26, 1353, København K, Denmark

    Ulrik H. Nielsen, Jean-Robert Tyran & Erik Wengström

  3. Department of Economics, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Jean-Robert Tyran

  4. Department of Economics, Lund University, P.O. Box 7082, 220 07, Lund, Sweden

    Erik Wengström

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  1. Alexander W. Cappelen
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  2. Ulrik H. Nielsen
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  3. Bertil Tungodden
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  4. Jean-Robert Tyran
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  5. Erik Wengström
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Correspondence to Erik Wengström.

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Cappelen, A.W., Nielsen, U.H., Tungodden, B. et al. Fairness is intuitive. Exp Econ 19, 727–740 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9463-y

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