New Experimental Results on the Solidarity Game

This paper revisits and extends the experiment on the solidarity game by Selten and Ockenfels (1998). We replicate the basic design of the solidarity game and extend it in order to test the robustness of the ’fixed total sacrifice’ effect and the applied strategy method. Our results only partially confirm the validity of the fixed total sacrifice effect. In a treatment with constant group-endowment rather than constant winner-endowment the predominance of the ’fixed total sacrifice’ behavior is replaced by ’fixed relative gift’ behavior. We additionally introduce a measure of personality characteristics and compare its specific components with pro-social gift behavior in our experiments. We don’t find correlations between actual gift behavior and measures of empathy-driven pro-social behavior used in social science.