Anyone up for helping the Fisherman's wife? More solidarity with accidental misery than with man-made misery

Abstract

We examine the willingness to donate depending on whether “misery” is random generated or self-inflicted by too high demands in bilateral negotiations. We find that randomness has a positive influence on the total amount of donation. In case of self-inflicted “misery” we observe that the subject who may have caused the unfavourable situation receives significantly less than the perceived innocent subject.altruism, bargaining experiment