This paper revisits the question of nationality effects in bargaining behavior, following Roth, Prasnikar, Okuno-Fujiwara, and Zamir (1991). We hypothesize that apparent nationality effects might simply be an artifact of uncontrolled for variations in the demographic mix of the subject pools. We conduct ultimatum and dictator game experiments on a variety of subject populations to test this hypothesis. The experiments took place in Columbia, South Carolina (U.S.) and in Moscow, Russia. In addition, we further stratified our subject pool in Columbia into environments with different demographic compositions. We observe differences in behavior across our stratified subject pools, but find that a lot of the variation is explained by demographic differences, and in particular by differences in the sex of the players.

Co-authors Anabela Bothelo and Marc Hirsch