This experiment investigates decisions made by prospective economists and physicians in an allocation problem which can be framed either medically or neutrally. The potential recipients differ with respect to their minimum needs as well as to how much they benefit from a treatment. We classify the allocators as either 'selfish', 'Rawlsian', or 'maximizing the number of recipients'. Economists tend to maximize their own payoff, whereas the physicians' choices are more in line with maximizing the number of recipients and with Rawlsianism. Regarding the framing, we observe that professional norms surface more clearly in familiar settings. Finally, we scrutinize how the probability of being served and the allocated quantity depend on a recipient's characteristics as well as on the allocator type.JEL Classification: A13, I19, C91, C72
A wealth of experimental findings on how real actors do in fact bargain exists. However, as long as there is no systematic general account of the several experiments bargaining theory remains dominated by axiomatic approaches based on normative requirements or on assumptions of full rather than bounded rationality. Contrary to that, the new axiomatic account of aspiration level balancing in negotiations of boundedly rational actors presented in this paper incorporates experimental findings systematically into economic bargaining theory. It thereby forms a descriptive theory of bargaining that has normative power as well. IntroductionRecent bargaining experiments as conducted by experimental economists generally adopt a very austere design. Due to thorough efforts of controlling the situation more often than not there is not much of the flavor of real world negotiations retained. Yet there is an older literature in which the experimental interaction situation is set up in ways more akin to real life. Clearly such a richer design has its disadvantages, too. It reduces the experimental control of variables and makes generalizations often harder to achieve. However, since richer experiments are often much closer to the real world they have very distinct advantages in characterizing real behavior whenever one succeeds in distilling general structures from them. This suggests to go back to the older richer experiments and to re-analyze them for general structures.There is a nowadays largely neglected German tradition of conducting "realistic" bargaining experiments. In particular people working with the founders of German experimental economics Heinz Sauermann and Reinhard Selten 1 have experimented on bilateral negotiations in a bounded rationality framework. They have described and to some extent analyzed their experiments and they indeed came up with some fairly general insights. For instance the analysis of * I am indebted to Wulf Gaertner who some twenty years ago offered me the opportunity to start research that brings together experimental economics, bargaining theory and bounded rationality modeling as separate but systematically related topics. His good counsel and support are gratefully acknowledged. Bartos and Tietz (1983) and Tietz and Werner (1982) leads to a basic structure of aspiration levels of a negotiating person j that may be summed up in the following way: P j is the planned goal, AT j is the agreement seen as attainable, AC j is the lowest acceptable agreement, T j is the planned threat to break off negotiation L j is the planned break off of negotiation.The experiments indicate that the preceding five levels should be expected to play a role in practically all real world bargaining processes and the mental processes of a typical bargainer j. The levels are ranked with respect to the preferences of person j such that P j is the highest level and L j is the lowest one. 2If we consider a bargaining problem in monetary space, the intervals between two adjacent aspiration levels of a pe...
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We report results of a survey of a representative sample of the German population in which respondents were asked for their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for either an extension of their life or an improvement in their health corresponding to a gain of one quality-adjusted life year (QALY). While one version of the survey exactly copied the questionnaire used in the EuroVaQ project (Pennington et al. 2014), in other versions the wording and the survey technique were modified. The findings show first that Germans have no higher WTP for health gains than other Europeans. Terms of use: Documents inSecond, the technique of posing the questions plays an important role when respondents are asked to imagine being in hypothetical situations. This clearly refers to the wording of the questions and the survey setting (personal or online interview). But even simple design elements such as offering an explicit option to say "No" right away greatly affect the answers, as does the position in the questionnaire that a particular question is given. This shows that in any attempts to base health care rationing decisions on the WTP of the population, where the latter is to be elicited using surveys, great care must be taken in designing the questionnaires. JEL-Code: I18.
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