Guilt aversion in (new) games: Does partners' payoff vulnerability matter?Giuseppe Attanasi, Claire Rimbaud and Marie Claire Villeval Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 142, issue C, 690-717 Abstract: We investigate whether players' guilt aversion is modulated by their co-players vulnerability. In new variations of a three-player Trust game, we manipulate payoff-vulnerability and endowment-vulnerability. The former (standard) vulnerability arises when a player's material payoff depends on another player's action. The latter arises when a player's initial endowment is entrusted to another player. Treatments vary whether trustees can condition their decision on the belief of a co-player who is payoff-vulnerable and/or endowment-vulnerable, or not vulnerable at all, and the decision rights of the vulnerable player. We find that trustees' guilt aversion is insensitive to both the dimension of the co-player's vulnerability and the decision rights of the co-player. Guilt is activated even absent the vulnerability of their co-players. Rather, players' guilt is triggered by the willingness to respond to their co-player's beliefs on their strategy. Keywords: Guilt aversion; Vulnerability; Psychological game theory; Dictator game; Trust game; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:142:y:2023:i:c:p:690-717 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.09.004 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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