ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, economists have been using the Ultimatum game (UG) and the Dictator game (DG) to measure people’s decision-making as reflecting self-interest or norms of altruism. Usually in an Ultimatum game two players are allotted a sum of money. The first player (called the “proposer”) offers a portion of the total sum to the second player (called the “responder”). The responder can either accept or reject the proposer’s offer. If the responder accepts, s/he receives the amount of the offer, and the proposer receives the remainder. If the responder rejects, then nobody receives anything. The Dictator game differs from the Ultimatum game in that the responder can only accept the proposer’s offer. The game is played only once, so the responder cannot reciprocate or punish offers by the proposers. Economists have rarely been interested in developmental questions, while developmental psychologists have long been investigating fair and prosocial behavior in children and adolescents without taking note of the debate in economics. Since the economic games differ from tasks typically used in research on fairness and moral development, connecting these two research traditions seems to be a promising interdisciplinary endeavor to study children’s sharing (prosocial) behavior (Gummerum, Keller, Takezawa, & Mata, 2008).
