Trading Goods versus Sharing Money- An Experiment Testing Whether Fairness and Efficiencyare Frame Dependent

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995, ) haveshown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations.This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharingmonetary rewards. But even when not just one kind of monetary tokens is distributedefficiency and fairness are less influential. We investigate and confirm this frame dependencymore systematically by comparing net-trade-proposals and payoff-proposals for thesame exchange economy with two traders, two commodities and multi-period-negotiations.