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Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

If testing psych students was smelly - this experiment is smellier.

Large amounts of cash = take whatever is offered.

Repeat experiment with a billion dollars. I offer you say 50 million, leaving 950 million to myself. Your move. You honestly going to reject 50 million?

It's actually quite rational that they took the money. Now, what would actually be interesting is that if they rejected the large amounts of cash.

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First, let's do the experiment with a billion dollars and see if you really just offer me 50 million.

That was just an example clearly illustrating my point.

I'd probably offer you a lot less if it were real - say 10-15 million.

I'm not real rich, but I'd turn you down. Someone so selfish running around with close to a billion dollars...no. The misery you could cause! Let the researcher keep their money, they will probably offer it to someone more deserving in the next round.

Doubt it. Quite sure you'd take it with both hands.

Seeing as you work in the oil industry - the above statement does strike one as being exceedingly odd. You are in the industry for the money aren't you?

That's some serious cognitive dissonance you've got there.

Furthermore, I thought you guys pumped misery out of the ground day in, day out?

>You are in the industry for the money aren't you?

Not really. In case you are interested, I am in the industry by accident.

>I thought you guys pumped misery out of the ground day in, day out?

No, we pump oil. And gas. By and large, these things are used to create a whole lot of happiness.

> Doubt it. Quite sure you'd take it with both hands.

Damn, now even I'm thinking I'd turn that down to teach your selfish ass a lesson.

You're confused because you're thinking about this (selfishly) as money being granted to you, and expecting your partner to do the same. Your parent (pun intended) is considering the whole relationship: Money will be redistributed from a researcher R to A and B only if A and B can agree on a fair distribution method. This will alter the balance of power between these three agents at a minimum. A and B should agree to this only if they both feel it is globally optimal; the more unfair the distribution A chooses, the more likely that this change is for the worse overall, which places increasing moral pressure on B to veto.

This isn't really something we can try, but I suspect you'd get turned down some reasonable percentage of the time (2%-10%, say) with such an offer, by people who have "all the money they need." Since to me the utility of the first few million is vastly larger than the last 500 million, I'd offer 50% just to avoid that rare case.

If someone is turning down $50M because they have "all the money they need", why would they then accept $500M?

The same reason, a normal person might decline $5 but accept $50 out of a pool of $100. 5% seems more unfair than 50%.

"i have all the money I need" is a different reason to "that's hardly fair!"

It's the combination of the two, I think.

That's hardly fair... but I need the money => Accept.

I don't need the money, but it's fair => Accept.

It's unfair, and I don't need the money => Turn down.

everybody with this argument is assuming the scientists didn't take the relative value into consideration for the experiment, I don't see it mentioned anywhere that they didn't

FTA:

> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies. So Henrich had no problem finding volunteers. What he had great difficulty with, however, was explaining the rules, as the game struck the Machiguenga as deeply odd.

Asking subsistence farmers to split a couple days' casual labour worth of wages seems to me roughly equivalent to asking undergrads to split $100. Both might last a few days to a week. If someone offered me $20 out of $100, I'd be inclined to take it: that's a free burger and beer at the campus pub while I watch the game. As an undergrad, that's a big enough take for me to get over the insult.

Indeed that equivalence is exactly what the researches attempted to do:

>the Machiguenga’s 20-soles stake equals about 2.3 days’ pay from the logging or oil companies that occasionally hire local labor. To match this amount, I set the UCLA stake at $160, which is about 2.3 days’ pay for a graduate student working as a “reader” ($9 –$10 per hour after taxes).

However, this still fails to take into account the decreasing marginal utility of "2.3 days' pay". The typical UCLA student is wealthy enough that 2.3 days' pay is not a big deal (AFAIK most US students only work in the summer?), while for the Machiguengos an additional 2.3 days' pay might be a lot.

You've got to consider that since they're tribal/rural, they also doesn't exactly ~need~ money to survive, and extra money is extra money in the same sense, so you can get a some extra luxury, they already have food*

* Wikipedia says they take subsistance from crops, fishing, rodents... It also says they make their own clothes, so, what's a lot for really? Aren't you failing to remember they don't depend on money as much as we to survive?

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