Not true. Offering 100% would be “most likely to be accepted”.
Because the thought experiment assumes he knows how much money you were given to begin with. If you give him 50% he’s very likely to think that he’s receiving a fair share. Yes, we might run into someone like you but the vast majority of people- both in this thread and in the real world- are going to consider the money communally owned, not the property of the first participant. If it belonged to the first participant, the experimenter wouldn’t be able to take it all back in the case of a rejected offer.
Exactly. The word “given” was used in the context of the first person was handed the money to split up, not given the money as his to keep and he was giving some of his money to the second person.
No, it does not. Yes, the second person does. The OP clearly states the money is for both people, so long as they can agree on how it is disbursed. The rest is just details of the rules of disbursement. You cannot clip out the entire scenario and zone in on the word “given” as it applies to Player 1 to say it means the money is his. It is “given” to him for disbursement purposes only. It’s theirs to split, and they have to agree on how that’s done.
Actually, Second has absolute power over whether either of them gets anything at all. From a certain perspective, that’s more power, more “claim” by force, than First has.
From the perspective of right, neither has any claim at all. Neither did anything to earn even one dollar. There’s no tragedy in both “losing” the money.
Because 50-50 is the obvious and natural division of a quantity into two portions, of course.
If the other guy, as Second, says he won’t take less than 60%, then he won’t get anything. I’d reject anything other than the obvious natural division, from either side, because there is no basis for anything else.
And getting the same amount is a special outcome because…why? Is it jealousy? Player 2 is just jealous that didn’t get to be player 1?
The vast majority of people in the real world accept 35%-40%, though. So they don’t, in fact, consider the money community-owned, nor should they. P1 gets money and P2 has power. That’s the only thing that needs to be considered. If you want to consider there to be a magic number, it’s 40%, not 50%.
Furthermore, I don’t like that people are thinking in terms of dollars. The only fair way to pose the question, I think, is in percentages. Otherwise, the whole thing changes. What if, instead of dividing $1,000, you had to divide a dime? Then no one cares at all. They might just give the whole thing to the other guy or just leave it sitting there on the table. But if it’s $1,000,000, people will take just $100. But hey, that’s just me.
Yes, that would be the most likely cause. When one participant in the experiment is given special treatment for no apparent reason, this is commonly perceived as unfair, and they are very likely to feel envious and be inclined to punish the person receiving special treatment (or wanting to make a statement to the same effect). I’m suprised this is a new concept for you.
I’m not saying I don’t understand the jealousy. I know that plays a role. What I don’t get is why people think that it evaporates at 50%. It doesn’t. Not in experiments, not in game theory, not anywhere. I realize that some people say “50%! Not a penny less!” but the fact is, most people don’t say that. They want 40% and some even want >51%! So why, as player 1, should I pick this magic number of 50%? It’s not the center of the bell curve. It’s not the upper limit of the curve either.
If you guys want to see some weird effects of this “irrationality”, you should look into conflict/war theory. War is costly. It would be better if two parties could just agree to split the issue in dispute. There are often a number of acceptible compromises that leave a faction better off than fighting a war. But we still fight wars…why?
The fact that people would be willing to accept less than half has nothing to do with whether they consider the money communally owned or not. It has to with the fact that they’d rather have something than nothing.
50% might not be the upper limit of the curve, but I’d expect if this game was plotted statistically, you’d see an extreme taper off of rejections after precisely 50.0%. I’d even expect there to be a noticeably jump between 49.9% and 50%, just based on human nature, as well as some of the responses in this thread. An even split for even work is something that’s been hardwired into most of us since birth, possibly even before then.
If I were to guess, you’d see a 90% acceptance rate when offering 60/40 split, but you’d get a 99% acceptance rate at a 50/50 split. So ~60/40 might represent the optimum strategy when averaged over multiple offers, but for a single offer, 50/50 reduces a substantial amount of risk.