A preference for negative reciprocity is an important part of the human emotional repertoire. We model its role in sustaining cooperative behavior but highlight an intrinsic free-rider problem: the fitness benefits of negative reciprocity are dispersed throughout the entire group, but the...

Donors who try to impose policy conditionality on countries receiving their aid commonly face conflicting incentives between using aid to induce income-increasing reforms and using aid to assist low-income countries: this conflict can lead to a time-consistency problem.This paper offers a...

We apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the concept of utility and then go on to a new model where individual’s behavior is aimed at reaching optimal level of arousal of neural system and optimal level of domination in social ranking.

How should benefit-cost analysis account for the value that benevolent individuals place on other people's pleasure from public goods? When adding up the benefits to be compared with costs, should we sum the private valuations, the altruistic valuations, or something else? This paper proposes a...

Resource transfers among households have received considerable interest among economists in recent years. Two of the main reasons for the surge of interest in household transfers are the information on human nature conveyed by transfer behavior and the implication on income redistribution policy...