Preferences, Intentions, and Subjective Expectations: a Large-Scale Experiment with a Representative Subject

We specify and estimate a structural model which separately identifies the effects of distribu-tional preferences and perceived intentions on responder behavior in the ultimatum game. We allow the effects of perceived intentions to depend, among other things, on the subjective prob-abilities responders attach to the possible offers. We estimate our model combining response decisions and subjective expectations data for a large representative sample from the Dutch pop-ulation. Distributional preferences and the effects of perceived intentions and subjective expecta-tions are allowed to depend on observed and unobserved characteristics of the participants. We find that the probability to reject an unfair offer falls with the subjective probability a responder attaches to getting such an unfair offer. We also find important differences between distributional preferences and effects of perceived intentions for different socio-economic groups. For example, young and high educated subjects attribute good intentions to very generous offers, while older and less educated subjects attribute negative intentions to the same offers.