A contractor finds $182,000 in depression era cash while remodeling the home of a high school friend. The homeowner-proposer offers 10% — that’s $18,200, nothing to sneeze at. The contractor-responder must have read the neuroeconomics texts because the response is textbook dictator game:
Kitts [the contractor-responder] was tearing the bathroom walls out of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie in 2006 when he discovered two green metal lockboxes suspended inside a wall below the medicine chest, hanging from a wire. Inside were white envelopes with the return address for “P. Dunne News Agency.”
“I ripped the corner off of one,” Kitts said during a deposition in a lawsuit filed by Dunne’s estate. “I saw a 50 and got a little dizzy.”
He called Reece [the homeowner-proposer], a former high school classmate who had hired him for a remodeling project.
They counted the cash [$182,000] and posed for photographs, both grinning like lottery jackpot winners.
But how to share? She offered 10 percent. He wanted 40 percent. From there things went sour.
Read the full AP story here, “Cash found in Ohio house’s walls becomes nightmare,”By JOE MILICIA, Associated Press Cleveland, 11.08.08
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