Research On Social-Preference Based On Ultimatum Game Experiments

The traditional hypothesis of rational agents gets more and more challenges as economic develops. Numerous studies show that, fair, as a social preference, is not only wide spread, but also has important implications on human economic behavior just as self-interest preference does. In a number of research methods, the behavioral game experiment in foreign countries has been widely used and proven in the study of human behavior has a strong explanatory power. In this paper, we use the ultimatum game as a main tool, designed three different experiments: pro-social behavior, perceived fairness and jealousy to explore the important issues in social-preference. We conducted the experiment with different design scenarios through the control of relevant variables to verify a number of factors on social-preference-based behavior.The three main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Target’s existence could significantly improve actor’s prosocial self-presentations, but the different power status of audience and co-actor made no noticeable difference. Actor’s background knowledge was proved to have certain effect, since in the experiment actors with economic background knowledge tended to present themselves more prosocially facing their co-actors rather than their audiences.(2) Individuals with dominant power roles perform more fairly (i.e., they offer more equal amounts in fairness priming conditions), whereas individuals with subordinate roles display significantly less fair behavior in the fairness priming condition.(3) Verified the existence of jealousy implicity by the ultimatum game experiment, jealousy implicity will affect the behavior of people within the fair behavior. Given other people present and under supervision, people may be psychological triggerd by jealousy, Experimental conditions which trigger the implicity of jealousy will decrease the bid significantly, while conditions which trigger the pertinence of jealousy will increase the bid.Innovations of our study are as follows:(1) Before our experiment, scholars have not conducted real ultimatum game experiments, only experimental study simulation. The main innovation is that this will bring the ultimatum game experiment to China under the the practice environment.(2) Scholars often use the ultimatum game experiment to study the issue of fairness preferences. Our study broadens the scope of the study of fairness preference, the introduction of more extensive social preferences would come in. And to look at the fair field from the perspective of jealousy, which are provided for the possible future research directions.(3) We improved researches of previous studies, given the introduction of roles and status differences between variables, with fair and equitable to study the behavior of the trigger mechanism.