Abstract

In the impunity game, responders, unlike the ultimatum game, cannot affect proposers' outcomes. Proposers in this game, like in the dictator game, have full control over their own outcome, as rejection from the responder has no effect on their payoff. Thus, the theoretical prediction of this game states that the responder should accept any offer. An experiment is designed aiming at analyzing both players’ behavior in the impunity game when subjects are aware of the gender of their partner. Additionally, we examine the effect of different stake sizes. In a first stage, an online experiment with eight different treatments is implemented, with a total number of 1,210 observations. From this data, the main findings are that proposers give to responders an important (around 35%) share on average, and that the stake, size as well as the gender identification, affect subjects' decisions. Moreover, responders’ rejection patterns follow the game theoretical prediction, although the hypothesis that knowing your counterpart sex/gender affects responders’ behavior cannot be rejected. Several sociodemographic characteristics are found to affect subjects’ behavior in this game, like personality and psychopathy traits, as well as their emotional intelligence level. New data for a second stage of this experiment where doodly vignettes tacitly transmit gender features and overcome other limitations of the previous stage, reinforce some of the results mentioned above.