Saima Mehmood & Asad Zaman
Abstract
Shahid Razzaque (2009) analyzes the effects of gender on the Ultimatum Game in Pakistan. A more detailed analysis of the data set reveals several additional insights that are not discussed in the original publication. We confirm Shahid Rezzaque’s finding that cultural effects lead to significantly different gender related behavior in Pakistan. Contrary to most of existing literature, female proposers offered significantly smaller amounts than male proposers. We have shown gender revelation resulted into stronger behaviors from males as signal of courtship behavior, when they start to offer significantly higher amounts. Female respond to males’ gesture with lower average offers than males, but deviation from their control behavior remain same for both male and female participants. We have also observed strong learning effect resulting from rejected offers in initial periods.
1. Concluding Remarks
Literature has consistently shown differences in behavior for both genders for many situations. This experiment was conducted to investigate differences in bargaining behavior for both genders in UG. The data has been collected over four period of time for consistent behavior. We have shown significantly different behavior for both genders in bargaining situation of UG. The experiment only studies the cross gender behaviors. The observations like same gender biases then become irrelevant[1].
Females offer consistently less than males both in control and treatment conditions. Initial rounds show quite different behaviors for small and big cities. Offers in small cities are higher than big cities. While, females offers are quite similar, except for Lahore (big city), where they made generous offers. Female offers remain between males offers in small and big cities. In second round, distribution of male offers different except Nawabshah, mean offers remain same but spread became wider. Female offers remain unchanged. There were no significant differences in respondent behavior either by city or by gender. Our learning explanation assume that proposer seem to learn the best reply in response to respondent’s reply. Significant learning behavior is observed only for rejected offers. Loss aversion can be attributed to learning in specific dimension.
Gender revelation in third round increases the male offers significantly; males in Lahore offered exceptionally higher shares to females. A significant courtship behavior is observed for male proposers, female response is however, not as significant. Deviations in behavior from their averaged control behavior for both male and female respondents are very similar. Average offer increases in both male to female and female to male offers.
When there are significant differences in proposing behavior, the respondent behavior surprisingly is quite similar over gender. Both genders report almost same patterns (acceptance over 40 percent of offered pie).
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[1] McGee and Constantinides (2010) found women offer other women more of the endowment than they offer men and they offer women even splits of the pie more frequently than they do men.