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Money burning is driven by reciprocity rather than spite

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2025

Rostislav Staněk*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University, Lipova 41a, Brno 60200, Brno, Czech Republic
Ondřej Krčál
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University, Lipova 41a, Brno 60200, Brno, Czech Republic
Katarína Čellárová
Affiliation:
Departemnet of Economics and Empirical Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, Charles University, nam. Curieovych 7, Prague 11640, Czech Republic
*
Corresponding author: Rostislav Staněk; Email: 75243@mail.muni.cz
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Abstract

The money-burning game (MBG) is widely used to study anti-social or destructive behavior. We extend the design of the MBG to separate three motives that could lead subjects to burn their partner’s money – spite, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. We detect that reciprocity is the dominant reason: Most of our subjects would only burn their partner’s money if they believed that their partner would burn theirs. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the behavior of the game.

Information

Type
Original Paper
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic Science Association.
Figure 0

Table 1. Burn action of different types

Figure 1

Table 2. Share of Burn actions in the open and hidden treatments

Figure 2

Table 3. Relative frequencies of types (in %)

Figure 3

Table 4. Average marginal effects of different experimental parts

Figure 4

Table 5. Average marginal effects for subjects following partner’s choice in SM

Figure 5

Table 1. Average marginal effects of experimental variations