On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games

John A. List
University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research

The dictator game represents a workhorse within experimental economics, frequently used to test theory and to provide insights into the prevalence of social preferences. This study explores more closely the dictator game and the literature’s preferred interpretation of its meaning by collecting data from nearly 200 dictators across treatments that varied the action set and the origin of endowment. The action set variation includes choices in which the dictator can “take” money from the other player. Empirical results question the received interpretation of dictator game giving: many fewer agents are willing to transfer money when the action set includes taking. Yet, a result that holds regardless of action set composition is that agents do not ubiquitously choose the most selfish outcome. The results have implications for theoretical models of social preferences, highlight that “institutions” matter a great deal, and point to useful avenues for future research using simple dictator games and relevant manipulations.

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of experimentation with ultimatum, dictator, and trust games.1 The common interpretation
I thank Steve Levitt for urging me to complete this study. The editor and two anonymous referees provided very insightful comments that helped to shape the manuscript. Remarks of Glenn Harrison, Emir Kamenica, Uri Simonsohn, and Chad Syverson improved the paper considerably. During the vetting process I learned of a fascinating experiment by Bardsley (2005) that predated my experiment. As discussed in the text, Bardsley uses a similar framing exercise and finds qualitatively similar results. 1 The ultimatum game, as originally reported by Guth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze (1982), is a two-stage game in which two people, a proposer and a responder, bargain over a fixed amount of money. In