Social Motives and Expectations in One-Shot Asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas

We propose a formal-behavioral framework with 3 components: nonselfish motives, expectations about others' nonselfish motives, and a game-theoretic component. For nonselfish motives, 3 nonstandard utility models representing altruism, inequality aversion, and norms are considered. Expectations are modeled as certain versus uncertain expectations. The game-theoretic component predicts behavior of actors and actors' expectations about behaviors of others. This framework is applied to asymmetric one-shot prisoner's dilemmas; predictions are tested experimentally. Formal analyses show that asymmetry provides new predictions through which nonstandard utility-expectation models can be distinguished. Empirical tests show that the inequality aversion model does considerably worse than altruistic and normative variants. Statistical tests for own motives, expected motives, and the association between the two are provided, while accounting for decision noise.