The Effect of $1, $5 and $10 Stakes in an Online Dictator Game

The decision rules underpinning human cooperative behaviour are often investigated under laboratory conditions using monetary incentives. A major concern with this approach is that stake size may bias subjects’ decisions. This concern is particularly acute in online studies, where stakes are often far lower than those used in laboratory or field settings. We address this concern by conducting a Dictator Game using Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this two-player game, one player (the dictator) determines the division of an endowment between himself and the other player. We recruited subjects from India and the USA to play an online Dictator Game. Dictators received endowments of $1, $5 or $10. We collected two batches of data over two consecutive years. We found that players from India were less generous when playing with a $10 stake. By contrast, the effect of stake size among players from the USA was very small. This study indicates that the effects of stake size on decision making in economic games may vary across populations.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2013-08-12

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Economics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0073131PMID 23951342PMCID 3741194
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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