Self-serving Regret: Experimental Evidence from a Reciprocity Game

Author:

Lian Zeng1,Shen Xin1,Zheng Jie2

Affiliation:

1. International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University

2. Tsinghua University

Abstract

Abstract Self-interested behavior has been well identified in dictator games: people allocate little or nothing to serve their interests better. Although it has long been recognized that beliefs about others are critical in interpersonal interactions, the mechanism by which self-serving beliefs result in self-serving behavior remains unclear. To explore the relationship among the conflict of interest, belief formation, and the resulting behavior, this study designed a three-stage reciprocity game with belief elicitation and regret option and conducted a laboratory experiment using university students as the subject pool. By asking recipients to predict the allocators' decisions and incentivizing the prediction, we discover that people rationalize their own self-serving bias by believing that others are similarly self-interested and then returning the 'favor' in the name of fairness. Additionally, this study examined post-decision regret by the reciprocators, and the asymmetry between upward and downward adjustments indicates a self-serving pattern: Reciprocators who under-estimated the allocated amount are less likely to make an upward adjustment compared to the likelihood of downward adjustment made by those who over-estimated the allocated amount. This study contributes to the literature on self-serving bias by better understanding the presence of self-serving beliefs and self-serving behavior.

Publisher

Research Square Platform LLC

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