Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies (original) (raw)

Cross-cultural Ultimatum Game Research Group

2004

In an effort to explore how humans respond to bargaining situations, economists have administered a number of different experiments. Among the simplest and most widely used of these experiments, the ultimatum game, seems to provide a number of robust and important insights into human economic reasoning that strongly contradict the predictions of standard game theory. Because the ultimatum game yields results in many different places (including Taiwan, Israel, Tokyo, Pittsburgh, Slovenia and even in Java), many economists have come to think of this bargaining behavior as a product of innate human-universal economic reasoning processes. For example, Roth (1995) proposed that humans possess an evolved cognitive process that balances an immediate self-interest with a drive to directly punish associates for inequitable transactions. However, recent data from a remote region in the Peruvian Amazon substantially deviates from the typical ultimatum game responses, suggesting that game perfo...