This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The question of whether lawyers and managers behave selfishly or fairly has inspired discussion for a long time. Empirical evidence, however, is sparse. Using data from an experiment with 359 law and business administration students, we investigate this question empirically and provide first...

The question of whether lawyers and managers behave selfishly or fairly has inspired discussion for a long time. Empirical evidence, however, is sparse. Using data from an experiment with 359 law and business administration students, we investigate this question empirically and provide first...

Experimental evidence from dictator games and simple choice situations indicates concerns for fairness and social welfare in human decision making. At the same time, models of inequality averse agents fail to explain the experimental data of individuals who reduce their payoff below a fair split...

We present a parametric learning model of players' dynamic and possibly out-of-equilibrium beliefs about other players' preferences that also incorporates random utility (noise). We estimate the model using the data from the four-country ultimatum game experiments of Roth et al. (1991). We find...

Reciprocity is one of the main basic social relations that constitute societies. It consists of being favourable to others because others are favourable to you (and not from an exchange in the strict sense). It rests on three possible rationales: (1) balance (comparison, matching), often related...

Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes for law, but coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter we survey the topic.

Welfare economics relies on consequentialism even though many philosophers have questioned this assumption. Survey evidence, based on a representative sample in Sweden, is presented here suggesting that most people’s ethical perceptions are consistent with consequentialism.

We conduct two simple experiments in which student participants are invited to give some of the money that they have earned to an international development charity for use in one of two African countries. In the between-groups experiment, participants are given the opportunity to donate to one...

This paper shows moral decision making is not well predicted by the overall fairness of an act but rather by the fairness of the consequences that follow directly. In laboratory experiments, third-party punishment for keeping money from a poorer player decreases when an intermediary actor is...