The Ostrich and its Conscience: Information in Dictator and Impunity Games

This paper studies the role of information in dictator and impunity games. We experiment with four settings: i) a standard dictator game; ii) a dictator game where the surplus size is stochastic, with a probability of being a big or small pie, and the actual size is unobservable to the responder; iii) an impunity game where responders can reject offers . proposers learn their responderfs action but this action does not affect a proposerfs payoff, and; iv) an impunity game where proposers will never learn their responderfs choice. In the dictator game with incomplete information, we observe that many proposers with big pies make offers as if they make generous offer, but had only a small pie to split. In the impunity game, proposers tend to make extreme offers of either nothing or half the pie. In the impunity game with incomplete information, gratuitous offers (0 < xR . 0.1) such as those commonly observed in the other games almost vanish, while many more proposers offer absolutely nothing. Our results point in favor of a utility-based approach to modeling social preferences in games of giving.