Empirical Application of Rubinstein Type Bargaining Models Among High School Students

Abstract

This paper describes results of a psychological research experiment on High School students. The Rubinstein game is a theoretical game where two players go back and forth to determine how to split a reward that is continuously decreasing in size. Although the Rubinstein game has been extensively studied and researched, very little has been done about alterations, especially when turning it into a communicative game. I conducted separate tests with three different trial groups. In the first test, participants were given the standard Rubinstein game to play. In the second and third, participants were given alterations of the game, in which the second had a small reward if they could not reach an agreement by the end of the game and in the third participants were allowed limited online communication before starting the game. Similar to Güth's findings, participants generally had a more even allocation of money in all trials than predicted, in which the communication group was most even (Güth 1982). Therefore, communication has a bigger impact on initial split than outside options. However, there were limitations to this study, and future research is needed to determine the impact of factors such as average income, age, and location of study.

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