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Status quo effects in fairness games: reciprocal responses to acts of commission versus acts of omission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

James C. Cox ,
Maroš Servátka  and
Radovan Vadovič
James C. Cox*
Affiliation:
Experimental Economics Center and Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
Maroš Servátka
Affiliation:
MGSM Experimental Economics Laboratory, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Sydney, Australia University of Economics in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia
Radovan Vadovič
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
*
prcjcc@langate.gsu.edu; jccox@gsu.edu
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Abstract

Both the law and culture distinguish between acts of commission that overturn the status quo and acts of omission that uphold it. This distinction is of central importance when it comes to reciprocal actions. A stylized fact of everyday life is that acts of commission elicit stronger reciprocal responses than do acts of omission. We report experiments that directly test whether this stylized fact characterizes behavior in controlled experiments. We compare reciprocal responses to both types of acts in experiments using binary, extensive form games. Across three experiments, we examine the robustness of our results to different ways in which the status quo can be induced in experiments. The data show a clear difference between effects of acts of commission and omission by first movers on reciprocal responses by second movers.

Keywords

ReciprocityStatus quoCommissionOmissionExperiment
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-016-9477-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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