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11 - Investment Trust Games: Effects of Gains from Exchange in Dictator Giving

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2010

Vernon L. Smith
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
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Summary

Of all the persons … whom nature points out for our peculiar beneficence, there are none to whom it seems more properly directed than to those whose beneficence we have ourselves already experienced. Nature, … which formed men for their mutual kindness, so necessary for their happiness, renders every man the peculiar object of kindness, to the persons to whom he himself has been kind. … No benevolent man ever lost altogether the fruits of his benevolence. If he does not always gather them from the persons from whom he ought to have gathered them, he seldom fails to gather them, and with a tenfold increase, from other people. Kindness is the parent of kindness.

A. Smith (1759; 1982, p. 225)

But what will explain the explanation?

Krutch (1954, p. 148)

A Celebrated Two-Stage Dictator Game

Berg et al. (1995, hereafter BDM) made an important and widely influential modification of the dictator game that explicitly introduced a key characteristic of personal social interactions: gains from “exchange.” Their investment trust two-stage dictator game also uses a double blind (most comparable to the HMSS Double Blind 2) protocol: Dictators in room A send any portion of their $10 (0 to $10) to their random counterpart in room B. People in both rooms know that if $x is sent by anyone, it is tripled, so that the counterpart receives $3x. Thus, the most generous offer, $10, yields a gain to $30.

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Rationality in Economics
Constructivist and Ecological Forms
, pp. 234 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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