Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study

Abstract

We conduct a laboratory study of the group-on group ultimatum bargaining with restricted within-group interaction. In this context, we concentrate on the effect of different within-group voting procedures on the bargaining outcomes. Our experimental observations can be summarized in two propositions. First, individual responder behavior across treatments does not show statistically significant variation across voting rules, implying that group decisions may be viewed as aggregations of independent individual decisions. Second, we observe that proposer behavior significantly depends (in the manner predicted by a simple model) on the within-group decision rule in force among the responders and is generally different from the proposer behavior in the one-on-one bargaining.

More than thirty years of ultimatum bargaining experiments: Motives, variations, and a survey of the recent literature

“…20 What early consistency tests (see the respective discussion in Güth, 1995) and the newspaper experiments reveal are different types of behavior: some participants would not accept their own offer, others accept nothing less than what they offer, and finally some offer more than what they minimally demand for themselves. 21 Having groups decide in the role of proposers and responders, rather than individuals, has fueled team research in economics (Bornstein and Yaniv, 1998;Elbittar et al, 2011; a survey is provided by Kugler et al, 2012). For reasons of succinctness, we do not discuss those studies in detail.…”

Who acts more like a game theorist? Group and individual play in a sequential market game and the effect of the time horizon

“…Therefore, we have a clear and unambiguous method to test which of two observed average response functions is closer to the prediction of subgame perfectness. 15 Clearly, in the group treatments it is the group decision-making process that maps individual member's preferences into a decision of the group. Hence, in estimating these models also for the group treatments we maintain an as-if assumption, according to which a group's decision is a re ‡ection of this "group's preferences."…”

Decision Maker Preferences for International Legal Cooperation

“… 82. See Robert and Carnevale 1997; and Elbittar, Gomberg, and Sour 2011. For reviews, see Kugler, Kausel, and Kocher 2012; and Charness and Sutter 2012. …”