Economics Letters 168 (2018) 112–114

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Economics Letters
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet

Impunity under pressure: On the role of emotions as a commitment

device
Loukas Balafoutas *, Tarek Jaber-Lopez
Department of Public Finance, University of Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria

highlights

• We study the role of emotions in rejections of unfair offers.

• We use the Impunity Game with and without time pressure.
• We find that under time pressure rejection rates are higher.

article info a b s t r a c t
Article history: We examine the emotional component of rejections in the Impunity Game in a dual-process framework.
Received 13 March 2018 Subjects reject unfair offers more frequently when decisions are taken under time pressure. This supports
Received in revised form 19 April 2018 the role of emotions as a commitment device.
Accepted 20 April 2018
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Available online 30 April 2018

JEL classification:
C91
D91
D63

Keywords:
Emotions
Commitment model
Impunity game
Time pressure
Experiment

1. Introduction
In the attempt to uncover the underlying motives driving hu-
man behavior in various situations and to identify the relative
weight of intuition and deliberation in decision making, a recent
body of literature has combined economic experiments with the
framework of dual-system processing. This framework (Kahne-
man, 2011, 2003) distinguishes between decisions taken predom-
inantly under the influence of System 1 (affective, intuitive, emo-
tional reasoning and faster response times) or System 2 (cognitive,
deliberative, effortful reasoning and slower response times). Time
pressure has often been used as a way to stimulate System 1
reasoning in several economic experiments on cooperation (Rand
et al., 2012; Tinghög et al., 2013; Lohse, 2016; Bouwmeester et al.,
2017), risk aversion (Kocher et al., 2013) or strategic sophistication
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: loukas.balafoutas@uibk.ac.at (L. Balafoutas).
(Kocher and Sutter, 2006; Lindner and Sutter, 2013). In the ultima-
tum game, rejections have been found to become more frequent
under time pressure (Sutter et al., 2003; Grimm and Mengel, 2011).
Rejections in this game can be driven by negative experienced
emotions, negative reciprocity, or a motive for reducing (disadvan-
tageous) inequality.
In this paper we consider the so-called Impunity Game (IG)
(Bolton and Zwick, 1995), which resembles the ultimatum game
with the difference that inequality aversion predicts accepting any
positive offer and negative reciprocity is irrelevant, meaning that
emotion-based motivations are the only possible reason for reject-
ing an offer. We are the first to provide experimental evidence
from the IG with and without time pressure, in order to assess
the role of emotions in rejecting unfair offers and thereby the
empirical relevance of the model of emotions as a commitment
device put forward by Frank (1988). In a nutshell, this model
proposes that emotions can serve as a valuable commitment device
if an individual is known to act affectively and passionately, often
abandoning narrow self-interest in the short run. This requires

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2018.04.027
0165-1765/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 L. Balafoutas, T. Jaber-Lopez / Economics Letters 168 (2018) 112–114
that such individuals have developed a predisposition to react
emotionally towards unfair treatment. In the IG, this means that
rejections of unfair offers should be more likely under time pres-
sure (System 1 reasoning). System 2, on the other hand, should
lead to higher acceptance rates and higher immediate payoffs for
receivers, because it is associated with the rejection of emotional
influence (Plessner et al., 2011).
We find that rejections of unfair offers in the IG are more
frequent when taken under time pressure, suggesting that they
are the product of intuitive rather than deliberative reasoning. This
result supports the empirical relevance of the model of emotions
as a commitment device.
2. Experimental design and procedures
Subjects in our experiment play the IG once. A proposer de-
cides how to split an endowment of e10 and a responder decides
whether to accept or to reject the offer. Offers were restricted to be
either e1 or e2 (for details see A.1. in the online appendix). If the
responder accepts the offer, both players keep the money allocated
by the proposer. If the responder rejects the offer she receives
nothing but the proposer still receives the money he decided to
keep for himself, i.e., the initial endowment minus the offer.
We implemented the IG in a 2 × 2 factorial between subjects
design. Following Yamagishi et al. (2009), we distinguished be-
tween a Private IG, in which the proposer never finds out whether
the responder rejected or not the offer, and a Public IG, where the
proposer receives feedback on the responder’s action. In addition,
we manipulated the time that responders had at their disposal to
make their decision: in condition Tight time pressure responders
had 10 s to accept or reject the offer, while in Weak time pressure
responders had 100 s to make their decision. Hence, we use time
pressure as an exogenous dual-process framework tool to force
half of our sample to decide quickly whereas the other half had
a very loose and practically irrelevant time constraint. This design
leads to four treatments. In treatment Priv10 responders play the
private IG under a time pressure of 10 s and in Priv100 they play
the private IG without time pressure. Similarly, in treatment Pub10
responders play the public IG under time pressure, while in Pub100
the time constraint is relaxed. Our sample consists of 240 under-
graduate students (60 subjects for each of the four treatments).
3. Results
Fig. 1 shows responders’ rejection rates in each treatment and
for each of the two offers, s = 1 and s = 2. We do not find
significant differences among treatments if we consider only the
higher offers of s = 2, with rejection rates varying between 24% in
Priv100 and 33% in Priv10 and Pub100 (χ 2 = 0.47, p = 0.49, N =
84). However, a number of interesting patterns emerge when we
consider offers of s = 1, which are more unfair and thereby more
likely to trigger stronger negative emotional reactions. Therefore,
in what follows we focus on offers of 1 euro, although in the
regression analysis (A.2. in the online appendix) we show that our
results hold when the two offers are pooled.
First, we find higher rejection rates when decisions are made
public: 28% of subjects rejected offers of 1 euro in the private IG
and 46% rejected offers in the public IG (χ 2 = 5.38, p = 0.02, N =
156). Broken down by time condition we find that, while under
weak time pressure the differences between the public IG and the
private IG are insignificant (rejections of 26% vs. 33% in Priv100
and Pub100, respectively; χ 2 = 0.05, p = 0.46, N = 78), under
tight time pressure they are very pronounced and statistically
significant: 59% of s = 1 offers are rejected in Pub10, compared
to 31% in Priv10 (χ 2 = 6.27, p < 0.01, N = 78).
113
Moreover, we find that time pressure is a crucial factor deter-
mining rejection rates. We maintain the focus of our analysis on
the most unfair offers of s = 1 and begin by noting that time
pressure has a significant effect on rejection rates (45% under tight
time pressure vs. 29% under weak time pressure; χ 2 = 3.95, p =
0.05, N = 156).1 This difference is primarily driven by the public
treatment. When responder decisions are communicated to pro-
posers the effect of time pressure is very large and statistically
significant, increasing rejection rates from 33% in Pub100 to 59%
in Pub10 (χ 2 = 5.16, p = 0.02; N = 78). Hence, rejections of very
low offers are more frequent when the emotional, affective system
1 is activated than when individuals decide under the influence of
the more deliberative and reflective System 2.
4. Discussion
What are the psychological motivations (proximate mecha-
nisms) that lead to rejections of unfair offers? The essence of the
model of emotions as a commitment device is that individuals
must ‘‘allow the emotional response to dominate and to disregard
the immediate incentives’’ (Yamagishi et al., 2009). In the words
of Frank (1988), the key is to become ‘‘predisposed to feel anger’’
(p. 258). This predisposition can be either genetic, or shaped by
personal experience or culture (Rand et al., 2012). In any case, such
a predisposition implies that rejections should be higher under the
influence of System 1 reasoning. Following this line of reasoning,
our results support the role of emotions as a commitment device:
rejection rates in our experiment increase when system 1 is acti-
vated through time pressure.
Our work promotes our understanding of human cognition and
decision-making by providing a direct test of the role of emotions
as a commitment device. But can anything be said about the exact
nature of negative emotions that lead to rejections in our experi-
ments? The related literature provides two plausible alternatives
by referring to anger (Yamagishi et al., 2009; Takagishi et al.,
2009; Van Leeuwen et al., 2017) and pride (Straub and Murnighan,
1995).2 That anger or pride lead to rejections of low offers is
reasonable even in the private condition of the IG, because a proud
or angered person is unlikely to take an offensive offer even in the
absence of observers, for instance in order to preserve his or her
self-respect. When, in addition to this motivation, responder deci-
sions are made public, it is no surprise that emotional responses are
even stronger and lead to higher rejection rates. The fact that our
treatment differences emerge for the very low offers of s = 1 but
not for those of s = 2 is also in line with the above considerations,
since the lower offer is more likely to be perceived as an insult,
provoking an intuitive and emotionally charged reaction.
Acknowledgments
We thank the University of Innsbruck for financial support. We
also thank Sarah Stuefer for valuable research assistance, as well as
Boris van Leeuwen, and Johannes Lohse for useful comments and
suggestions.
Declarations of interest
None.
1 While time pressure has been shown to increase mistakes (Recalde et al.,
2018), this is an unlikely driver of our findings since the decision context is a very
simple one. Moreover, if mistakes played a major role, we should observe a similar
treatment effect for higher offers of s = 2; this is not the case.
2 Anger has in fact been shown to fulfill certain properties that are necessary for
the commitment model to be applicable (Van Leeuwen et al., 2017).
114 L. Balafoutas, T. Jaber-Lopez / Economics Letters 168 (2018) 112–114

Fig. 1. Responders’ rejection rates, by treatment and offer.

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Supplementary material related to this article can be found
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