I agree that this decision changes with sums. After all, if we value punishing unfairness at X, then as long as someone offers us more than X we will accept. The larger the sum involved in the game, the smaller the proportion of that sum will be required to meet X.

I wouldn’t call getting value from punishing unfairness, or hurting someone else irrational. That is why I have the ‘ marks around rational. Punishing someone for being unfair is a consumption decision. If someone offers you 5 cents of $1 and you know rejecting will punish them for being pricks, then you are really spending that 5 cents in order to punish them, which you gain value from. Its just like buying an ice-cream, in a sense.

The issue of whether chimps were being offered an equivalent deal to humans is a very interesting one. Ultimately, we don’t know. In fact we can’t really say that the offer is equivalent between people, as the satisfaction people get from the sacrifice, and their expectations all differ. A dollar for one man is different than a dollar for another. Ultimately I suspect that Chimps play the game more like the ‘self-interested’ agent that we study in economics as they do not have the same social structure.

As we are in a sense bounded rational, the social norms we develop influence the payoff we receive from certain choices, which makes us play games differently even in situations that these social norms were not meant for.

Most definitely a lot of intelligent people have discussed fairness. I’d like to hear what people have to say about it. It seems like its a structural issue to me, something that is the result of society or our genes, or both.

If you’re splitting $1 into 99%-1% then the second person is unlikely to care about the 1c.

If you’re splitting $1,000,000 then they will probably take the $10,000.

I’m assuming that they are doing this experiment on the chimps using food. I guess the comparison would be that if you cut the food up into a miniscule piece the chimps may not care either – if they can even see it!

I suspect part of it is that people are assuming the OTHER player isn’t rational.
IE: If i only offer this guy 5c out of this dollar, he’s probably gonna be pissed off and would value the enjoyment he would get from denying me the 95c more than the 5c he’s getting.

I would be surprised if the concept of fairness isnt, or hasnt been, the topic of many economic doctoral theses.

You raise a good point though. These concepts such as fairness are incredibly subjective. How does a person develop a sense of fairness, where does that come from? This is where we need a psychologist to give us a hand I think.

Phil U explained.