Giving According to Preferences: Decision-Making in the Group Dictator Game

We study the decision process in a group dictator game in which three subjects can distribute an initial endowment between themselves and a group of recipients. The experiment consists of two stages; first, individuals play a standard dictator game. Second, individuals are randomly matched into groups of three and communicate via instant messaging regarding the decision in the group dictator game. In contrast to former studies our results show that group decisions do not differ from individual decisions in the dictator game. Furthermore, the analysis of the chat history reveals that players make proposals according to their preferences as revealed in the single dictator game and that these proposals in groups drive the final allocation.