Is discounting of future instantaneous utilities consistent with altruism towards future selves? More precisely, can temporal preferences, expressed as a sum of discounted instantaneous utilities, be derived from a representation in the form of a sum of discounted total utilities? We find that a...

We investigate whether temporal preferences expressed as a sum of discounted consumption utilities can be derived from a welfare representation in the form of a sum of discounted total utilities. We find that a consumption-based representation in the usual exponential form corresponds to...

The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous benefits than otherwise. We...

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for productive effort. A family is modelled as a pair of altruistic siblings. Each sibling exerts effort to produce output under uncertainty and siblings may transfer output to each other. We show that altruism has a non-monotonic effect on...

Recognizing that individualism, or weak family ties, may be favorable to economic development, we ask how family ties interact with climate to determine individual behavior and whether there is reason to believe that the strength of family ties evolves differently in different climates. For this...

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for production of effort, where family ties are defined as a mixture of true and coerced altruism between family members. We model families as pairs of siblings. Each sibling exerts effort in order to obtain output under uncertainty. A...

Bergin and Lipman (1996) show that the refinement effect from the random mutations in the adaptive dynamics in Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and Young (1993) is due to restrictions on how these mutation rates vary across population states. We here model these mutation rates as endogenously...

Evolutionary theorizing has a long tradition in economics. Only recently has this approach been brought into the framework of non-cooperative game theory. Evolutionary game theory studies the robustness of strategic behaviour with respect to evolutionary forces in the context of games played...