Steve Landsburg has an interesting point about versions of the Dictator Game (and several other similar games) in which people have the option to “destroy” some or all of the money if they don’t like the offer. In particular, he recently commented on the so-called “Destructor Game” ( pdf of paper here).
In this game, participants were given the option of deciding whether or not to take away some of the money that the experimenter had given to some of the other participants. When they chose to do so, the experimenters concluded that they were indulging a taste for destruction. As Landsburg sensibly points out, nothing was actually destroyed in any of these experiments. Money was simply transferred from an anonymous subject back to the experimenter.
The reason I bring this up here is because it seems like as good as place as any to get an answer to the next question—has anyone actually ever done such an experiment in which the goods to be destroyed were actually destroyed. (You can imagine giving everyone candy bars, and giving the participants the option to take someone else’s candy bars and throw them into some stinking garbage heap). My instinct is that Landsburg is right, and people would be less likely to engage in destructive behaviour if they were destroying actual goods instead of just paper money, but I would be interested to see if this has ever actually been studied. Does anyone know?
I’ve never heard of a “destroy the money” experiment, but the fact that most economists before Landsburg didn’t think of this, and I didn’t think of it, and my sources didn’t think of it, makes me skeptical that the average participant in the Dictator Game is thinking of it.
I’m also reminded of stories about medical malpractice lawsuits, where juries will sometimes award really big sums of money even when they’re not sure whether the doctor was guilty, on the grounds that hospitals/clinics/insurances are large faceless institutions and probably have so much money they won’t miss a little. I would expect players to treat the researcher (presumably working off grant money from a big research university) the same way juries treat hospitals.
On the theme of point destruction, there’s a reasonably big literature on a variation where destruction of rewards can be undertaken by players to reduce the rewards of other players, with variations where they control who can see what cooperative acts and vary the sizes of the group. Dunbar’s number sometimes makes an appearance. I imagine you’ve heard of this, and if you haven’t hopefully this comment will add it to your arsenal of game theory. It would be awesome if it made an appearance later in your sequence :-)
The general hand-wavy upshot is that for humans (assuming you’re in a situation where large scale cooperation and positive externalities are actually possible and valuable to you) the best situation is to be in a large-ish group where people can at least see defectors after the act of defecting, and can also see other people’s punishment behavior, and can punish both outright defectors and also “punish non-punishers”. So far as I’m aware, you don’t need recourse to more recursion than that. You don’t have to get totally silly with punishing of non-punishers of non-punishers of defectors. There are elements of the literature here, here, and here, if anyone wants entry points. The first is most accessible :-)
Steve Landsburg has an interesting point about versions of the Dictator Game (and several other similar games) in which people have the option to “destroy” some or all of the money if they don’t like the offer. In particular, he recently commented on the so-called “Destructor Game” ( pdf of paper here).
In this game, participants were given the option of deciding whether or not to take away some of the money that the experimenter had given to some of the other participants. When they chose to do so, the experimenters concluded that they were indulging a taste for destruction. As Landsburg sensibly points out, nothing was actually destroyed in any of these experiments. Money was simply transferred from an anonymous subject back to the experimenter.
The reason I bring this up here is because it seems like as good as place as any to get an answer to the next question—has anyone actually ever done such an experiment in which the goods to be destroyed were actually destroyed. (You can imagine giving everyone candy bars, and giving the participants the option to take someone else’s candy bars and throw them into some stinking garbage heap). My instinct is that Landsburg is right, and people would be less likely to engage in destructive behaviour if they were destroying actual goods instead of just paper money, but I would be interested to see if this has ever actually been studied. Does anyone know?
I’ve never heard of a “destroy the money” experiment, but the fact that most economists before Landsburg didn’t think of this, and I didn’t think of it, and my sources didn’t think of it, makes me skeptical that the average participant in the Dictator Game is thinking of it.
I’m also reminded of stories about medical malpractice lawsuits, where juries will sometimes award really big sums of money even when they’re not sure whether the doctor was guilty, on the grounds that hospitals/clinics/insurances are large faceless institutions and probably have so much money they won’t miss a little. I would expect players to treat the researcher (presumably working off grant money from a big research university) the same way juries treat hospitals.
On the theme of point destruction, there’s a reasonably big literature on a variation where destruction of rewards can be undertaken by players to reduce the rewards of other players, with variations where they control who can see what cooperative acts and vary the sizes of the group. Dunbar’s number sometimes makes an appearance. I imagine you’ve heard of this, and if you haven’t hopefully this comment will add it to your arsenal of game theory. It would be awesome if it made an appearance later in your sequence :-)
The general hand-wavy upshot is that for humans (assuming you’re in a situation where large scale cooperation and positive externalities are actually possible and valuable to you) the best situation is to be in a large-ish group where people can at least see defectors after the act of defecting, and can also see other people’s punishment behavior, and can punish both outright defectors and also “punish non-punishers”. So far as I’m aware, you don’t need recourse to more recursion than that. You don’t have to get totally silly with punishing of non-punishers of non-punishers of defectors. There are elements of the literature here, here, and here, if anyone wants entry points. The first is most accessible :-)