Weighting the Waiting: Intertemporal Social Preferences

This paper studies intertemporal social preferences. We introduce intertemporal dictator and ultimatum games where players decide on the timing of monetary payoffs. The setting is two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional, in the sense that inequalities can arise in the time as well as in the social dimension. The results of our experiment show that for equal monetary payoffs, decisions regarding waiting time show similar patterns as decisions regarding monetary payoffs in the standard games. Moreover, decisions regarding waiting time depend on inequalities in monetary payoffs in a systematic way, with this dependence being more pronounced in ultimatum than in dictator games.