Experimental Evidence from Zimbabwean Villages after Land Reform

Inequality considerations are a motive for making positive o¤ers in the Ultimatum Game and rejecting small ones, but decision error could have the same e¤ect. I \u85nd evidence for both of these considerations and a di¤erent relative importance amongst Zimbabwean villagers, of whom some resettled after a government organized land reform during the 1980s. Resettled villagers have higher inequality aversion and lower decision error than those who live in traditional villages but, after accounting for di¤erent levels of inequality aversion, the di¤erence in decision error between both groups of villagers is no longer signi\u85cant. There are no gender di¤erences in preferences. The model estimated was \u85rst used by De Bruyn and Bolton (2004) on a large set of bargaining data but the best \u85t of 64 percent overall coincidence of observed and predicted behavior is achieved for a di¤erent symmetricspeci\u85cation of inequality aversion in the model. As the use of \u85eld data is a recent development in experimental economics, I reestimate the model applied to the Zimbabwean data on the laboratory Ultimatum Game data of Roth et al. (1991) and further \u85eld data from Henrich et al. (2005). Estimates are compared comprehensively