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Dictator game
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==Variants== The Trust Game is similar to the dictator game, but with an added first step. It is a sequential game involving two players, the trustor and the trustee.<ref>Thielmann, Isabel & Böhm, Robert & Ott, Marion & Hilbig, Benjamin. (2021). Economic Games: An Introduction and Guide for Research. Collabra Psychology. 7. 19004. 10.1525/collabra.19004.</ref> Initially called the Investment Game by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe in 1995, the trust game originated as a design experiment to study trust and reciprocity in an investment setting.<ref>Berg, J.; Dickhaut, J.; McCabe, K. (1995). “Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History”. Games and Economic Behavior. 10 (1): 122-142. {{doi|10.1006/game.1995.1027}}.</ref> In the trust game, the trustor first decides how much of an endowment to give to the trustee. The trustor is also informed that whatever they send will be tripled by the experimenter. Then the trustee (now acting as a dictator) decides how much of this increased endowment to allocate to the trustor. Thus the dictator's (or trustee's) partner must decide how much of the initial endowment to trust with the dictator (in the hopes of receiving the same amount or more in return). In this game, it is all about trust and trustworthiness in order to determine the behavior of the two players.<ref name="Alos">Alos-Ferrer, C.; Farolfi, F. (2019). “Trust Games and Beyond”. Frontiers in Neuroscience. 13: 887. {{doi|10.3389/fnins.2019.00887}}</ref> Since trust is an important factor in economic behavior, trust and trustworthiness must be addressed at an individual level by utilizing experimental designs involving both roles in different trust games.<ref name="Alos"/> The experiments rarely end in the [[subgame perfect Nash equilibrium]] of "no trust". Often, studies found that having more trust resulted in the participant losing more in the end.<ref name="Alos"/> Since the decision to trust is dependent on the belief that the other participant will reciprocate, according to Berg et al.'s study, then the first participant will usually send an endowment even when they are not expecting anything back, similar to the practical conditions of participating in the lottery.<ref name="Alos"/> This is because the trustor wants to avoid the responsibility of leaving the trustee with no endowment and risking zero payoffs at the end of the game.<ref name="Alos"/> A pair of studies published in 2008 of identical and fraternal twins in the US and Sweden suggests that behavior in this game is [[heritability|heritable]].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Cesarini |first=David |author2=Christopher T. Dawes |author3=James H. Fowler |author4=Magnus Johannesson |author5=Paul Lichtenstein |author6=Björn Wallace |title=Heritability of cooperative behavior in the trust game |journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |volume=105 |issue=10 |pages=3721–3726 |date=11 March 2008 |doi=10.1073/pnas.0710069105 |pmid=18316737 |pmc=2268795 |bibcode=2008PNAS..105.3721C |doi-access=free }}</ref> Betrayal aversion is another major factor that weighs the impact of trust and risk, determining whether trusting another person is equivalent to taking a risky bet.<ref name="Bohnet">Bohnet, I.; Zeckhauser, R. (2004). “Trust, risk and betrayal”. J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 55: 467–484. {{doi|10.1016/j.jebo.2003.11.004}}</ref> Initially coined by Bohnet and Zeckhauser, betrayal aversion could prevent the trustor from not trusting the trustee due to the social risk of having zero payoffs.<ref name="Bohnet"/> Their study looked at a practical experiment where participants were randomly paired with one another to increase the probability that the outcome would be dependent on the actions of the trustee selected. Results from the study showed that regardless of whether the trustor placed a safe or risky bet, the payoffs were not equivalent to the trustee's payoffs.<ref name="Bohnet"/> Ultimately, Bohnet and Zeckhauser assessed potential risk with the Trust Game and the relative hesitation made by each participant when deciding the amount to give in the game. A variation of the dictator game called the "taking" game (see “Experiments" section above for further detail) emerged from sociological experiments conducted in 2003, in which the dictator decides how much utility to “take” from the recipient's pre-determined endowment. This dictator game variation was designed to evaluate the idea of greed, rather than the idea of fairness or altruism generally evaluated with the standard dictator game model, also referred to as the "giving" game.<ref name="ChowdhuryJeon2017" />
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