On the Impact of an Intermediary Agent in the Ultimatum Game

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors study ultimatum games in which proposers delegate negotiation to an intermediary agent by setting limits on both ends of the offer. They find that, after taking censoring into account, intermediaries treat these limits similarly to a non-binding suggestion from the proposer. Specifically, the authors benchmark a non-binding scenario in which the proposer simply states the offer it would like to be made. They find that specifying a constraint on the intermediary has the same effect as the benchmark suggestion once censoring is taken into account.

 

The article is interesting and well written, maybe some real situation should be emphasized more, the first one that came to my mind reading the article was that of a real estate agent.

The topic is interesting and the literature is current, 44% of the references cited have been published in the last 10 years and 31% of the references cited have been published in the last 5 years.

Regarding the experimental design and results, the authors point out that the instructions are included in Annex A, an annex that I have not seen, or that has not reached my hands to be able to review it, it would be appreciated if they could explain in more detail how the experiment has been and add some captures or photos of the experiment.

Regarding the results, 40 individuals per treatment do not leave us much room for maneuver and it could be said that it is a very small sample for the study, you should enlarge the sample. Also, it would be good to know the individual behavior of the people who play the ultimatum, to see if individual characteristics have effects or not, for example cognitive abilities, gender, repetition, etc., issues that have not been mentioned in the paper. This would help to understand much better the design and the experiment itself, as well as clarify the results.

Author Response

The reply is attached as a file, because there are tables in it. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of the paper is interesting as the ultimatum game is interesting game-theoretical problem. However, the authors did not mention the definition of the ultimatum game. It is worth noting that there are many variations of the game in the literature. One can find the ultimatum game with only two actions for each player as well as continuum of strategies. The authors also mentioned about Appendix A, where the reader can find instructions for the experiments and Appendix B. I could not find them so it is hard to review the manuscript. I suggest enclosing Appendix A and B at the end of the work. 

Author Response

Reply Reviewer 2.

The topic of the paper is interesting as the ultimatum game is interesting game-theoretical problem.

We are grateful for this sentiment.

However, the authors did not mention the definition of the ultimatum game.

 

We actually did define the ultimatum game in the previous version, but we try to do a better job in this version. Paragraph 5 of the paper now states:

“We study an abstract bargaining setting by using the ultimatum game (Güth et al., 1982). The ultimatum game is a two-player interaction commonly used in the literature to model abstract bargaining settings. In the two-player interaction, the two players are named “proposer” and “responder.” The “proposer” has the first move and offers a split of a sum of money to a “responder”. The responder can accept or reject the proposed split, where a rejection leads to zero payoffs to both participants.”

It is worth noting that there are many variations of the game in the literature. One can find the ultimatum game with only two actions for each player as well as continuum of strategies. The authors also mentioned about Appendix A, where the reader can find instructions for the experiments and Appendix B. I could not find them so it is hard to review the manuscript. I suggest enclosing Appendix A and B at the end of the work. 

 

The Appendix is now included at the end of the manuscript.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The article has improved a lot and it is now much easier to read and understand.

I am very grateful to the authors for making all the suggestions I made. Also, I still think that the table you have sent me on participant information denotes certain points that could be of interest, for example one of the points you see is that age is significant in the case of Responder regardless of treatment, this should perhaps be highlighted. There are also interesting points in some treatments that do not occur in others.

Nevertheless, I think they have made a great effort and it shows in the final result.