Trading goods versus sharing money : an experiment testing whether fairness and efficiency are frame dependent

Systematic experiments with distribution games (for a survey, see Roth, 1995) have shown that participants are strongly motivated by fairness and efficiency considerations. This evidence, however, results mainly from experimental designs asking directly for sharing monetary rewards. But even when not just one kind of monetary tokens is distributed efficiency and fairness are less influential. We investigate and confirm this frame dependency more systematically by comparing net-trade-proposals and payoff-proposals for the same exchange economy with two traders, two commodities and multi-period-negotiations