Диктатор ойыны: Әділеттілік және экономикалық мінез-құлық

Experimental tool
The dictator game is a popular experimental instrument in social psychology and economics, a derivative of the ultimatum game. The term "game" is a misnomer because it captures a decision by a single player: to send money to another or not. Thus, the dictator has the most power and holds the preferred position in this “game.” Although the “dictator” has the most power and presents a take it or leave it offer, the game has mixed results based on different behavioral attributes. The results – where most "dictators" choose to send money – evidence the role of fairness and norms in economic behavior, and undermine the assumption of narrow self interest when given the opportunity to maximise one's own profits.

The dictator game is a derivative of the ultimatum game, in which one player (the proposer) provides a one time offer to the other (the responder). The responder can choose to either accept or reject the proposer's bid, but rejecting the bid would result in both players receiving a payoff of 0. In the dictator game, the first player, "the dictator", determines how to split an endowment (such as a cash prize) between themselves and the second player (the recipient). The dictator's action space is complete and therefore is at their own will to determine the endowment, which ranges from giving nothing to giving all the endowment. The recipient has no influence over the outcome of the game, which means the recipient plays a passive role. While the ultimatum game is informative, it can be considered too simple a model when discussing most real world negotiation situations. Real world games tend to involve offers and counteroffers while the ultimatum game is simply player one placing forward a division of an amount that player 2 has to accept or reject. Based on this limited scope, it is expected that the second player will accept any offer they are given, which is not necessarily seen in real world examples. In the original dictator game, the dictator and the recipient were randomly selected and completely unknown. However it was found that the result was different depending on the social distance between the two parties. The level of "social distance" that a dictator and a recipient have changes the ratio of endowment that the dictator is willing to give. If the dictator in the game has anonymity with the recipient, resulting in a high level of social distance, they are most likely to give less endowment, whereas players with a low level of social distance, whether they are very familiar with each other or shallowly acquainted, are more likely to give a higher proportion of the endowment to the recipient.

The idea that the highly mixed results of the dictator game prove or disprove rationality in economics is not widely accepted. Results offer both support of the classical assumptions and notable exceptions which have led to improved holistic economic models of behavior. Some authors have suggested that giving in the dictator game does not entail that individuals wish to maximize others' benefit (altruism). Instead they suggest that individuals have some negative utility associated with being seen as greedy, and are avoiding this judgment by the experimenter. Some experiments have been performed to test this hypothesis with mixed results.

The Trust Game is similar to the dictator game, but with an added first step. It is a sequential game involving two players, the trustor and the trustee. Initially called the Investment Game by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe in 1995, the trust game originated as a design experiment to study trust and reciprocity in an investment setting. In the trust game, the trustor first decides how much of an endowment to give to the trustee. The trustor is also informed that whatever they send will be tripled by the experimenter. Then the trustee (now acting as a dictator) decides how much of this increased endowment to allocate to the trustor. Thus the dictator's (or trustee's) partner must decide how much of the initial endowment to trust with the dictator (in the hopes of receiving the same amount or more in return). In this game, it is all about trust and trustworthiness in order to determine the behavior of the two players. Since trust is an important factor in economic behavior, trust and trustworthiness must be addressed at an individual level by utilizing experimental designs involving both roles in different trust games. Betrayal aversion is another major factor that weighs the impact of trust and risk, determining whether trusting another person is equivalent to taking a risky bet. Initially coined by Bohnet and Zeckhauser, betrayal aversion could prevent the trustor from not trusting the trustee due to the social risk of having zero payoffs. Their study looked at a practical experiment where participants were randomly paired with one another to increase the probability that the outcome would be dependent on the actions of the trustee selected. Results from the study showed that regardless of whether the trustor placed a safe or risky bet, the payoffs were not equivalent to the trustee's payoffs. Ultimately, Bohnet and Zeckhauser assessed potential risk with the Trust Game and the relative hesitation made by each participant when deciding the amount to give in the game. A variation of the dictator game called the "taking" game (see “Experiments" section above for further detail) emerged from sociological experiments conducted in 2003, in which the dictator decides how much utility to “take” from the recipient's pre determined endowment. This dictator game variation was designed to evaluate the idea of greed, rather than the idea of fairness or altruism generally evaluated with the standard dictator game model, also referred to as the "giving" game.