Do our perceptions of fairness change if we are transacting with a machine vs. a human? This question is an inversion of the Turing test, which discerns whether human and machine behavior are indistinguishable. A research team found that when exposed to identical offers to share a fixed amount of money (known as the ultimatum game), study participants “rejected more human than computer offers, indicative of the human condition invoking social fairness norms.” It turns out that social context has an outsized impact on how our brains assess the fairness of economic outcomes. The implications of this in a commercial framework could be significant, if it means broadly that buyers behave more rationally, in line with classical economics, if they know they are buying from a machine.
Do our perceptions of fairness change if we interact with machines
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