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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2000 Nov 7;267(1458):2177–2182. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2000.1266

The spatial ultimatum game.

K M Page 1, M A Nowak 1, K Sigmund 1
PMCID: PMC1690799  PMID: 11413630

Abstract

In the ultimatum game, two players are asked to split a certain sum of money. The proposer has to make an offer. If the responder accepts the offer, the money will be shared accordingly. If the responder rejects the offer, both players receive nothing. The rational solution is for the proposer to offer the smallest possible share, and for the responder to accept it. Human players, in contrast, usually prefer fair splits. In this paper, we use evolutionary game theory to analyse the ultimatum game. We first show that in a non-spatial setting, natural selection chooses the unfair, rational solution. In a spatial setting, however, much fairer outcomes evolve.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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