Analyzing Behavior Across Four Simple Economic Games

We present an experiment on the behavior of individual subjects across four simple economic games: the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Bargaining Game, the Trust Game, and the Public Goods Game. Subjects complete the games using the strategy method with role reversal. We thus gather data from each subject that allows us to construct a full decision plan for each role in each game, and we then study the relationships between behavior at the individual subject level in the different games. The finding that choices in individual games are useful for predicting behavior in other games indicates that the decisions that people make in simple economic games have validity and relevance outside of the specific game in which the decisions were made