New Experimental Results on the Solidarity Game

This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity gameby Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidaritygame and extend it in order to test the robustness of the fixed totalsacrifice' effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only partiallyconrm the validity of the xed total sacrifice effect. In a treatment withconstant group-endowment rather than constant winner-endowment thepredominance of the fixed total sacrfice behavior is replaced by fixedrelative gift' behavior. We additionally introduce a measure of personalitycharacteristics and compare its specific components with pro-social giftbehavior in our experiments. We don't find correlations between actualgift behavior and measures of empathy-driven pro-social behavior used insocial science.