Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.

Human behaviour in economic interactions has attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last decades. The economic assumption that people would behave focusing on their own material self-interest was proved incomplete, once the empirical evidence consistently showed that many other motives...

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Main Authors: Ignacio Tamarit, Angel Sánchez
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2016-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4934685?pdf=render
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spelling doaj-e8d4bc17dc924b97be41de8bdb5d740e2020-11-25T00:07:16ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032016-01-01117e015873310.1371/journal.pone.0158733Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.Ignacio TamaritAngel SánchezHuman behaviour in economic interactions has attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last decades. The economic assumption that people would behave focusing on their own material self-interest was proved incomplete, once the empirical evidence consistently showed that many other motives may influence such behaviour. Therefore, models that can incorporate rational decision process as well as other intervening factors are a key issue to both understand the observations from economic experiments and to apply the lessons learned from them. In this paper, we incorporate the influence of emotions to the utility function in an explicit manner, using the Ultimatum Game as a case study. Our model is amenable to analytical study, and is connected with the Circumplex model of emotions and with Kahneman's two-system theory. The simplicity of the model allows to obtain predictions for the offers and acceptance thresholds. We study two specific examples, when the model parameters are distributed uniformly or normally, and show that in the latter case the results are already qualitatively correct. Although this work can be considered as a first approach, it includes what we believe are the main stylized facts, is able to qualitatively reproduce experimental results in a very simple manner, and can be straightforwardly extended to other games.http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4934685?pdf=render
collection DOAJ
language English
format Article
sources DOAJ
author Ignacio Tamarit
Angel Sánchez
spellingShingle Ignacio Tamarit
Angel Sánchez
Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
PLoS ONE
author_facet Ignacio Tamarit
Angel Sánchez
author_sort Ignacio Tamarit
title Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
title_short Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
title_full Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
title_fullStr Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
title_full_unstemmed Emotions and Strategic Behaviour: The Case of the Ultimatum Game.
title_sort emotions and strategic behaviour: the case of the ultimatum game.
publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
series PLoS ONE
issn 1932-6203
publishDate 2016-01-01
description Human behaviour in economic interactions has attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last decades. The economic assumption that people would behave focusing on their own material self-interest was proved incomplete, once the empirical evidence consistently showed that many other motives may influence such behaviour. Therefore, models that can incorporate rational decision process as well as other intervening factors are a key issue to both understand the observations from economic experiments and to apply the lessons learned from them. In this paper, we incorporate the influence of emotions to the utility function in an explicit manner, using the Ultimatum Game as a case study. Our model is amenable to analytical study, and is connected with the Circumplex model of emotions and with Kahneman's two-system theory. The simplicity of the model allows to obtain predictions for the offers and acceptance thresholds. We study two specific examples, when the model parameters are distributed uniformly or normally, and show that in the latter case the results are already qualitatively correct. Although this work can be considered as a first approach, it includes what we believe are the main stylized facts, is able to qualitatively reproduce experimental results in a very simple manner, and can be straightforwardly extended to other games.
url http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4934685?pdf=render
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