Moral wiggle room in the dictator game

Abstract

This study analyzes a modified dictatorship game in which, before splitting a fixed endowment, dictators are informed about the amount their recipients would have kept for themselves had they been assigned the role of allocators. We posit that dictators will selectively use the additional information and exploit a moral wiggle room — they will keep a larger amount when they face recipients who would have behaved more selfishly than themselves and ignore the knowledge in case of more benevolent recipients. We ran an experiment with treatment and control sessions, giving dictators information regarding potential recipients only in the former. Our experimental findings support our hypotheses, which suggest that dictators’ decisions are driven not just by their idiosyncratic preferences for fairness but also by those of others. Our paper contributes to the literature on subtle contextual cues that adversely affect the prosocial behavior of dictators.