The Power of Reciprocity FAIRNESS, RECIPROCITY, AND STAKES IN VARIANTS OF THE DICTATOR GAME

The topic of reciprocity has long played an important role in anthropology, ethnology, and sociological thinking, for instance, in the classic writings of Georg Simmel (1950), Bronislaw Malinowski (1926), Marcel Mauss (1950/1990), or Alvin Gouldner (1960). More than four decades ago, Gouldner clarified the concept and its dimensions and assumed the existence of a universal norm of reciprocity in a well-known article. Recently, new interest in the issue of reciprocity has grown in sociology and political science in the context of the vivid debate about “social capital.” Although there is a long tradition in sociology of research on reciprocity, a systematic theory leading to empirically testable predictions is still lacking. In economics and game theory, on the other hand, reciprocity was incorporated into rigorous models and has given rise to a more coherent theoretical perspective. However, the standard economic approach has the weakness that it cannot account for altruistic reciprocity or compliance to reciprocity norms in unrepeated interactions. Yet field studies and experimental studies alike support the existence of a norm of reciprocity for a wide array of social activities and even among strangers. Recent developments in experimental game theory try to account for these observations contradicting the standard approach. Building on models from “behavioral game theory” (Camerer 1997), I will explore some of the core hypotheses of reciprocity theory using experimental data. In the sec-