To Switch or Not to Switch Payment Scheme? Determinants and Effects in a Bargaining Game

The incentive scheme selected in a laboratory experiment might trigger different type of behavior in participants. This paper is an attempt to screen the strategies adopted by agents in a bargaining game when buyer and seller have partly conflicting interests and are asymmetrically informed. We allow participants to choose the incentive scheme through which they will be paid at the end of the experiment controlling for past experience and individual characteristics. It is well known that payment method is highly correlated to the risk preferences shown by individuals, but little research is devoted to the analysis of the behavior induced by Random Lottery Incentive scheme (RLI for short) and Cumulative Scheme payment (CS for short) both on individual and social results. This paper aims to fill the gap.