Anna Macko

Several years ago, Cohen, Dearnaley, and Hansel [1] demonstrated that under the influence of alcohol drivers became more risk prone, although their risk perception remained unchanged. Research shows that ambiguity aversion is to some extent positively correlated with risk aversion, though not very highly [2]. The question addressed by the present research is whether alcohol reduces ambiguity aversion. Our research was conducted in a natural setting (a restaurant bar), where customers with differing levels of alcohol intoxication were offered a choice between a risky and an ambiguous lottery. We found that alcohol reduced ambiguity aversion and that the effect occurred in men but not women. We interpret these findings in terms of the risk-as-value hypothesis, according to which, people in Western culture tend to value risk, and suggest that alcohol consumption triggers adherence to socially and culturally valued patterns of conduct different for men and women.

Data from surveys indicate that people, in general, do not trust others. On the other hand, in one-shot trust games, where the player decides whether to send money to an anonymous partner, the actual rate of trust is relatively high. In two experiments, we showed that although reciprocity expectations and profit maximization matter, they are not decisive for trusting behaviour. Crucial factors that motivate behaviour in trust games seem to be altruism and a type of moral obligation related to a social norm encouraging cooperative behaviour. Finally, we were able to divide participants into specific profiles based on amount of money transferred to the partner, altruistic motivation, and belief in partners’ trustworthiness. This shows that the trust game is differently perceived and interpreted by different participants

The perception of fairness of an offer in ultimatum type games may not only depend upon the distributional aspects of the offer itself but also on the intentions of the proposer that an offer may signal. Recovering intentions is subtle and may depend heavily upon the environment and consequently on the construction of the game. For example, one aspect of the environment could be the set of available alternative offers as studied in Falk et al. (2003). In this paper we report an experiment and provide evidence of a new aspect of an environment, which is related to the notion of temptation in a mini ultimatum type game that affects perception of fairness. Two games are put to test. In both games, a proposer has two available offers, fair and unfair, to choose from and the fair offer is kept identical across the games. However, in one game the unfair offer is significantly more skewed in favor of the proposer than the unfair offer in the other game. We show that the rejection rate of the more unfair offer is systematically less than the rejection rate of the less unfair offer across the two games.