On the Impact of an Intermediary Agent in the Ultimatum Game
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Delegating bargaining to an intermediary agent is common practice in many situations. The proposer, while not actively bargaining, sets constraints on the intermediary agent’s offer. We study ultimatum games where proposers delegate bargaining to an intermediary agent by setting boundaries on either end of the offer. We find that after accounting for censoring, intermediaries treat these boundaries similarly to a nonbinding proposer suggestion. Specifically, we benchmark on a nonbinding setting where the proposer simply states the offer they would like to have made. We find that specifying a constraint on the intermediary has the same effect as the benchmark suggestion once censoring is accounted for. That is, giving an agent a price ceiling or price floor is treated, by the agent, the same as expressing a direct price wish, as long as the constraint is not binding. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of the importance of communication and the role of constraints in bargaining with intermediaries.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it