People Want a Fair Economic Shake

[mawilson 2,133]

That's a different study which you're welcome to try and see if No. 2 declines.

If everyone acted like No. 2, there would be no disparity between the rich and the poor.

Corollary: people act like No. 2 only in a hypothetical test scenario.

In the study, the two players are equal - neither one of them has an advantage over the other. I suppose you could say No. 1 has the advantage to decide how the prize money is split between the two, but that advantage is countered with No. 2's power to decline the offer where neither of them benefit. That's a far cry from an employer/employee relationship, where money is linked to productivity and profit, rather than just a handout.

How about:

No. 1 - Employer

No. 2 - Union

[one...two...tree 2,762]

That's a different study which you're welcome to try and see if No. 2 declines.

If everyone acted like No. 2, there would be no disparity between the rich and the poor.

Corollary: people act like No. 2 only in a hypothetical test scenario.

In the study, the two players are equal - neither one of them has an advantage over the other. I suppose you could say No. 1 has the advantage to decide how the prize money is split between the two, but that advantage is countered with No. 2's power to decline the offer where neither of them benefit. That's a far cry from an employer/employee relationship, where money is linked to productivity and profit, rather than just a handout.

How about:

No. 1 - Employer

No. 2 - Union

Go unions!

[HAL 9000 96]

Interesting finds, Steven. Here's some psychological foundations and research as of late into altruistic behavior:

[Abstracts ONLY]

Nature 452, 348-351 (20 March 2008)

Winners don't punish

Anna Dreber1,6,7, David G. Rand1,2,7, Drew Fudenberg3 & Martin A. Nowak1,4,5

A key aspect of human behaviour is cooperation1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. We tend to help others even if costs are involved. We are more likely to help when the costs are small and the benefits for the other person significant. Cooperation leads to a tension between what is best for the individual and what is best for the group. A group does better if everyone cooperates, but each individual is tempted to defect. Recently there has been much interest in exploring the effect of costly punishment on human cooperation8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. Costly punishment means paying a cost for another individual to incur a cost. It has been suggested that costly punishment promotes cooperation even in non-repeated games and without any possibility of reputation effects10. But most of our interactions are repeated and reputation is always at stake. Thus, if costly punishment is important in promoting cooperation, it must do so in a repeated setting. We have performed experiments in which, in each round of a repeated game, people choose between cooperation, defection and costly punishment. In control experiments, people could only cooperate or defect. Here we show that the option of costly punishment increases the amount of cooperation but not the average payoff of the group. Furthermore, there is a strong negative correlation between total payoff and use of costly punishment. Those people who gain the highest total payoff tend not to use costly punishment: winners don't punish. This suggests that costly punishment behaviour is maladaptive in cooperation games and might have evolved for other reasons.

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PNAS | May 10, 2005 | vol. 102 | no. 19 |

Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation

How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers, then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited "folk theorem" result that suggests that punishment can allow the evolution of any strategy.

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Nature. 2005 Jan 6;433(7021):1

Human behaviour: Egalitarian motive and altruistic punishment.

Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr and Gächter present experimental evidence in humans indicating that negative emotions towards non-cooperators motivate punishment, which, in turn, provokes a high degree of cooperation. Using Fehr and Gächter's original data, we provide an alternative analysis of their experiment that suggests that egalitarian motives are more important than motives for punishing non-cooperative behaviour. This finding is consistent with evidence that humans may have an evolutionary incentive to punish the highest earners in order to promote equality, rather than cooperation.