Bargaining, Inequality, and Willingness to Bribe: A Novel Experimental Design

Recent decades have seen a surge in experimental research on collective action problems. These problems, which include bargaining and cooperation situations, often result in free-riding and corruption, especially when the initial resources that people have at their disposal are unequal. These typical real-world situations can be stylised using specific experimental games to study human competitive and cooperative behaviour. In the wake of the above, this work proposes a novel, three-stage experimental design that endogenously determines initial endowments, starting from the Ultimatum Bargaining Game. The outcome of the Ultimatum Bargaining Game serves as the initial endowment for a real-effort Public Goods Game. The outcome of the Public Goods Game then serves as the basis for a subsequent Bribery Game, in which the willingness to engage in bribery is assessed. A reduction in final earnings is applied when the bribery threshold has been exceeded. The experimental design involves treatment and control groups to investigate the conditions under which individuals contribute to local and global public goods. This design offers a novel opportunity to study the provision of public goods, incorporating elements of novelty that hold promise for advancing our understanding of collective action.