We demonstrate how altruism can flourish in a population of nonaltruists. We assume that each individual plays a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game with his or her sibling and that the probability than an individual survives to reproduce is proportional to his or her payoff in this game. We model...

We conduct a real-effort task experiment where subjects' performance translates into a donation to a charity. In a within-subjects design we vary the visibility of the donation (no/private/public feedback). Confirming previous studies, we find that subjects' performance increases, that is, they...

Traditionally, giving in dictator games was assumed to signal preferences over others' payoffs. To date, several studies find that dictator game giving breaks down under conditions designed to increase dictators' anonymity or if an option to take money obscures the purpose of the task. Giving is...

The intersection of the standard altruism hypothesis with the quite strong evidence that bequests tend to be equal suggests that inter-vivos transfers should be strongly compensatory. Yet the available evidence is not in congruence with this implication. It has therefore been inferred that the...

We study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. We show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience and we reason...

We offer a game-theoretic proof of Hamilton's rule for the spread of altruism. For a simple case of siblings, we show that the rule can be derived as the outcome of a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game between siblings.

Which motives drive the decision of a voter to approve or reject a policy proposal? The Public Choice literature distinguishes between instrumental and expressive voting motives. We investigate the importance of these motives by analysing the patterns of neural activity in different voting...

We study the regulation of a morally responsible agent in the context of a negative consumption externality and motivation crowding. In particular, we analyze how various governmental interventions affect the agent's motivation to assume moral responsibility. Employing a motivation-crowding...

This paper explores individual motives for volunteering: The analysis is based on the interpretation of volunteering as a consumption good (consumption model) or as a mean to increase individual’s own human capital (investment model). We present an econometric framework taking into account...

We investigate how group boundaries, and the economic environment surrounding groups, affect altruistic cooperation and punishment behavior. Our study uses experiments conducted with 525 officers in the Swiss Army, and exploits random assignment to platoons. We find that, without competition...