Ultimatum Game Bargaining Behaviour: A Classroom Experiment

This study aims to investigate the types of bargaining behaviour students have and the variables that affect these bargaining behaviours by designing an ultimatum bargaining game in the classroom environment (during the real exam). The experimental group consists of 202 students who took the spring term economics final exam. The strategic interaction between students was formulated as a two-person bargaining problem. A cooperative solution was based on the Nash solution also obtained for bargaining problem among students. The findings of this study show that the highest bargaining equilibrium in this game is the equilibrium status based on the Nash solution. Moreover, we concluded that the success of the economy course and the grade-level affect the students’ behaviour according to the equilibrium strategy based on the Nash solution. JEL Codes: C90, C70, C78, C57

How (un-)informative are experiments with “standard subjects” for other social groups? – The case of agricultural students and farmers

This paper analyzes whether there is a gap between agricultural students’ and non-students’ (farmers’) behaviors in economic experiments which are often used to measure risk aversion, impatience, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust. A further question is whether monetary incentives matter in this respect. We use the Holt and Laury procedure (2002) to elicit risk aversion, the procedure according to Laury et al. (2012) to measure impatience, a gift exchange game (Charness et al. 2004) to capture positive reciprocity, an ultimatum bargaining game (Güth et al. 1982) to assess negative reciprocity, a dictator experiment (Engel 2011) to gauge altruism, and a trust game (Kosfeld et al. 2005) to assess trust in others. We find no differences between agricultural students and farmers in their risk aversion, whereas the latter are fund to be considerably more impatient than the former. Positive and negative reciprocity is slightly more pronounced with farmers. Findings regarding altruism in the two groups are mixed and trust is somewhat more pronounced with farmers. The paper challenges approaches that assume that students can be used as standard experimental subjects whose behaviors can be generalized towards other populations.