An Experimental Analysis of the Ultimatum Game: The Role of Competing Motivations

This paper forwards a new way of accounting for the experimental evidence related to the Ultimatum Game. We argue that players in this game have reasons to be both fair and self-interested, but the balance between these two considerations cannot be expressed in terms of a tradeoff. We test our thesis by perturbing the Ultimatum Game in a way that emphasizes the force of self-interest considerations; the evidence we collected provides support for our thesis.