糖心原创

Title: A Boy Named Sue: The Impact of Player Labels in tacit bargaining games

Authors: Andrea Isoni (Warwick Business School), Lian Xue (Wuhan University), Shuo Yang (Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University), Jiwei Zheng (Lancaster University)

Abstract: Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling proposed that bargainers can use their shared knowledge of theoretically irrelevant aspects of the situation to concert their expectations on one of the agreements, which becomes the ‘focal point’ of that situation. In this study, we report an experiment exploring how player labels - that is, irrelevant but commonly-known characteristics of the bargainers themselves - affect their behaviour in the Battle of the Sexes. We find that when players are labelled as ‘king’ and ‘duke’, the ‘king’ plays more hawkishly than the ‘duke’. Interestingly, when players are labelled as ‘male’ and ‘female’, those with the female label play more hawkishly than those with the male label. We conclude that player labels, as strategy labels, can significantly change behaviour in tacit bargaining games such as the Battle of the Sexes, and they should be taken into consideration when analysing individuals’ behaviour in tacit bargaining situations.