Ultimatum & Dictator

At a family dinner on Sunday the subject came up of corrupt officials offering tickets to the olympics and everyone being sooo shocked that these naughty foreigners would do such a thing.
 

But it reminded me of the games that economists (?) devised that can be used as some "objective" test of how participants value fairness, and tolerance for unfairness (i.e. tolerance of corruption) and how this varies between nations, societies and cultures.  

Basically the point of these games is to arrange that random people to play the games in various countries and record the results, the idea being that its simple enough that its meaningful to compare across.

Its 2 related games, Ultimatum and Dictator, the details are in the wiki articles...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game

Ultimatum is like the childhood game, that parents use to have children split portions "you cut the pie and ill choose" etc, except that the chooser, can only accept the split, or punish the splitter by rejecting and both sides get nothing.

So basically, the offer is a measure of the "fairness", and the level at which offers are generally rejected is a measure of "intolerance of unfairness"

Dictator, is similar but there is only one participant, and they dictate the split  with no fear of punishment, hence it is a more pure test for "fairness" more similar to altruism.

But i think its quite interesting how some countries vary, and some are similar. but there is a table of countries compared here on page 7;

https://docs.google.com/open?id=1Xxn-HWlkHpUnQbADTrc4WrjGU3yCvyjGn06jC4bbfC4p6Qf3nkD5JivKNSGM

 

I based my recollection on a different article, but I couldn't find that one, so this is not the original article that I was going on about.

But this one also has a country table and makes the same point which is that there are wide cultural differences in fairness and tolerance of unfairness 

(and The UK is no-where near as fair as I remember, lol, so I am clearly selectively biased in my remembering of this stuff)

The paper also makes the point that the results were heavily dependent on context and how the game was presented to participants.

If you are a glutton for punishment, there is more about Ultimatum in this paper here;

https://docs.google.com/open?id=1V0_WTOaGO7mxR5l_Rw0zVdo9GGDUHx_F4vK6nlBgJ4zOWJJoy9YobiHk6jLF


Oosterbeek, Hessel, Randolph Sloof, and Gijs van de Kuilen (2004)