The Behavioral Impact of Emotions in a Power to take Game: An Experimental Study

The power to take game is a simple two player game where players are randomly divided into pairs consisting of a take authority and responder. Both players in each pair have earned an own income in an individual real effort decision-making experiment preceding the take game. The game consists of two stages. In the first stage, the take authority decides how much income will be transferred from the responder to the take authority after the second stage (the so-called take rate). In the second stage, the responder can punish the take authority by destroying own income. The transfer from the responder to the take authority will be based on the income of the responder that is left after the second stage. In this experimental study, we are primarily interested in how emotions influence responder behavior. Our findings are the following. (1) A higher take rate significantly increases the intensity of irritation, contempt, and envy, and significantly decreases the intensity of joy and happiness. Since negative emotions are experienced as painful, there is direct hedonic impact. (2) Irritation and contempt drive punishment behavior. (3) There are discontinuous “jumps” in the behavior of responders. They either choose no punishment (destroy nothing) or the highest level of punishment (destroy everything). (4) Expectations have a significant effect on the probability of punishment but not on the intensity of experienced emotion. We explain this last result in terms of norm-related regulation of emotions.<BR><BR>