The economic analysis of law mostly relies on the assumption of self-interested agents. Until the early 1970s, it is little concerned with the issues of rescue and helping. Now, an economic analysis of rescue laws appears with the works of Landes and Posner (1978). We show that the emergence and...

I ran an experiment in order to evaluate the relationship, if any, between power, or the search for power, and the degree of altruism. In particular I experimentally tested whether an organization structured in a strictly hierarchical way was able to reduce the degree of altruism of a group of...

We show that subjects who set their minimum acceptable offer to zero in an ultimatum game are the most generous players in a dictator game. This finding challenges the interpretation of the acceptance of low offers as payoff-maximizing behavior.

The social utility model suggests that people feel more satisfied with equal divisions of resources than from inequitable outcomes, even when the latter favors oneself. Research examining children’s behavior has shown that the tendency to share half of one’s endowment increases with age...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht das Fairnessverhalten von Studierenden unter-schiedlicher Studienrichtung. Hierzu wurden 289 Studierende der Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena vor zwei verschiedene Entscheidungssituationen gestellt. In diesem Befragungsexperiment mussten die Studierenden wählen, wie...

The paper analyzes the trade-off between power and altruism by using an experimental framework which involved a group of experimental agents, undergraduate students of the University of Siena. The results show that the introduction into the experimental structure of a tournament for the power...