Competition for Power and Altruism

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 appreciably altered the behaviour of agents. More specifically the degree of altruism, measured by the dictator offers, significantly decreased when the agents were able to trade altruism for power. The results were more clear-cut and robust in the case of the dictator game, but also in the case of the ultimatum game the introduction of the tournament for power altered the behavior of subjects. A significant gender effect emerged.     

Limits to Altruism: Organ Supply and Educational expenditures

Current U.S. law prohibits compensation for cadaveric organ donation. The resulting organ shortage causes thousands of deaths per year. The primary tool currently relied on by the organ procurement industry to increase organ supply is educational spending aimed at both industry professionals and the general public. This article evaluates the effectiveness of such spending across a fairly comprehensive and unique sample of free-standing U.S. organ procurement organizations, controlling for the size of the organization, population demographics, and geographic region. The authors find no evidence that such spending is effective on the margin and conclude that the organ shortage is unlikely to be resolved by increased educational expenditures. (JEL I18 , I11 )     

Altruism and the Economic Values of Environmental and Social Policies

Altruism is a type of non-use value which can have different definitions depending on the type of goods entering the utility function of the altruists and their expectations about the contributions of others. The purpose of this paper is to measure the trade-offs between different types of altruist values originating from social and environmental policies. Environmental policies are concerned with reducing health effects from a power plant while social policies involve both the attainment of public facilities for education and leisure and an increase in the income of the affected population. The empirical application utilizes a choice experiment technique which allows for valuation of multiple goods. Health effects are decomposed into the values of the risk of becoming ill, the duration of the episodes and the limitations imposed by illness. Altruist values are elicited from a population that is not affected by pollution. Results show that altruism is significant for policies directed to reducing health effects and improving the income level of the affected population, whereas there is egoism for a policy aimed at improving public facilities in the polluted suburb. The value of altruism is significantly influenced by the expectations of net benefits to be received by the affected population.     

信用主体:自利与利他的对立统一

自利与利他均具有复杂性,而更为复杂的,还在于自利与利他的相互交叉.信用主体作为信用关系的承载人,客观上是自利与利他的对立统一体.诚信作为信用主体应有的道德品质,是信用不可或缺的伦理基石,诚信本身内含利他元素.自利与失信之间并不存在必然联系:追求长期利益的自利不仅与失信毫无关系,恰恰相反,彼此诚信、互惠互信倒是追求长期利益的自利倾向的内在要求;惟有那种短期运利动机支配下的自利,在信息不对称、一次性博弈、缺乏可置信的惩罚威胁等条件下,才会导致失信.     

Altruism,Warm Glow and the Willingness-to-Donate for Green Electricity: An Artefactual Field Experiment

The ongoing liberalization of electricity markets in most western countries forms the background of our artefactual field experiment. Using a Cheap talk design [R.G. Cummings and L.O. Taylor. American Economic Review 89 (1999) 649–665] with supplementary monetary incentives, we test for presence of “warm glow” motivations [J. Andreoni. Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989) 1447–1458; Economic Journal 100 (1990) 464–477] in the willingness-to-donate for electricity generated from renewables. Our data from 200 participants supports impure altruism, that is, individuals benefit from both contributing to environmental quality and its current level when opting in favor of green electricity. Furthermore, we find evidence of crowding-out as well as crowding-in effects. Depending on the knowledge of people about electricity markets and the types of electricity contracts offered, “all-or-none” contracts are most likely to bring about crowding-out effects.     

Overlapping Generations or Infinitely-Lived Agents: Intergenerational Altruism and the Economics of Global Warming

Do we need an overlapping generations model for the economics of global warming? To answer this question, an infinitely-lived agent (ILA) approach and an overlapping generations (OLG) model are contrasted. ILA and OLG can be viewed as polar representations of intergenerational altruism. With ILA an immortal agent acts through his investment/savings decisions as trustee on the behalf of the future generations. With OLG, agents need not behave altruistic. They simply save during working years and dissave completely during retirement. Nevertheless, ILA and OLG must not differ in their implication for greenhouse policy. Greenhouse gas abatement is a straightforward alternative to physical capital formation and, even without altruism, each age cohort has an incentive to provide current abatement in order to reduce future damages attributable to climate change. Indeed, under reasonable assumptions and parameter values, our simulations reveal such an invariance result. Provided carbon taxes are the only policy tool and tax revenues are recycled through socially mandated rules, projections of economic growth, climate change and energy consumption are only insignificantly affected by the choice of approach.     

Altruism and Spite in a Selfish Gene Model of Endogenous Preferences

Economists and biologists have long grappled with the apparent contradiction of altruism in a naturally-selected world. Standard economic models are built upon an assumption of material self-interest where agents maximize individual outcomes without regard for the effects on others. This paper begins with a brief discussion of the evidence that human behavior deviates from the economic assumption. With the goal of more accurately describing human nature, the interpersonal components of preferences are derived in a genetic model. This model predicts a variety of behaviors that are considered paradoxical within the standard economic framework. The optimal attitude towards others is parameterized by the genetic relationship between individuals and by the population size. For interactions between ‘average’ individuals, the standard economic assumption is the limiting case of the genetic model as the population becomes arbitrarily large. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Group Selection and Team Sports

Team sports offer direct analogies with evolutionary explanations of the conflict between individual and group objectives. These analogies are discussed, and falsifiable hypotheses are suggested.     

Intergenerational Altruism and the Environment

We construct an overlapping generations model of pollution externality in which individuals are altruistically linked to their offspring as in Barro (1974). It is shown that steady-state consumption may be a decreasing function of the intergenerational degree of altruism. Despite individuals' altruism, the competitive equilibrium is not optimal. We thus study the social optimum and show that it can be decentralized.
JEL classification: D 62; D 64; D 91     

Sexual Selection and Economic Positioning

Synopsis In their recent survey of Darwinian aesthetics, Grammer et al. (2003) note the surprising lack of a connection between studies related to human beauty and the theory of sexual selection. Understanding this missing link sheds new light on recent research that indicates positional concerns Pingle & Mitchell 2002, Solnick & Hemenway 1998, are important factors in the decision-making process. Integrating the theory of sexual selection into the decision framework found in economics makes it possible to explain why individuals are potentially willing to accept less, as long as it places them in a superior position relative to others.     

对金融活动公平性的伦理关注

在世界金融发展中,金融活动的公平性已经成为金融发展的重要标志之一。中国金融活动的公平问题亦是一个难以回避的问题,对中国金融公平性的关注,不只是对金融活动的伦理关注,也是对金融活动自身完善性的表现。在中国现代金融建设中,如何体现金融活动的公平性是一项长期而艰难的任务,是金融业健康发展的内在动力。     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Leadership,Altruism, and Social Organization

The objective of the conference on “Leadership, Altruism, and Social Organization” was to bring researchers together who were interested in exploring the functioning of the nonprofit sector. The conference and this special issue focus on three themes. First, what causes social and volunteer‐based organizations to successfully compete against a private enterprise? Second, why do individuals or organizations take the lead in providing or securing provision of public goods? Third, what are the consequences of having altruistically motivated agents, and how can such motives be sustained?     

On the Relevance of John Rawls's Theory of Justice to Welfare Economics

Mainstream microeconomic theory makes some use of John Rawls's Theory of Justicein discussing welfare economics and social welfare functionals. While various elements of his approach are usually mentioned, his basic point is generally taken to be his difference principle (maximizing the welfare of the worst off individual) applied as a decision principle for evaluating the equity of resource allocation.

To take the difference principle as the essence of Rawls's work is an error. The present paper reviews the basic argument of the Theory of Justice

compares it with the use that economists make of it, and concludes that in a number of quite specific ways Rawls's ideas are misrepresented and misused by mainstream microeconomists.     

生态视角的市场选择机制研究

从演化角度分析组织行为是目前经济学研究的热点。本文以生物进化为基础，探讨市场的构成和市场选择的内涵，提出了市场选择的机制包括效率甄别、互惠互利、产业选择、密度制约和产品对策影响，用动态分析的方法对市场理论进行了有益探索。     

The Human Adaptation for Culture and its Behavioral Implications

During phylogeny, man adapted for culture in ways other primates did not. This key adaptation is the one that enabled humans to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This genetic event opened the way for new and powerful cultural processes but did not specify the detailed outcomes of behavior we see today. It just provided the basis for cultural evolution that, with no further genetic events, enabled the distinctive characteristics of human cognition. These capabilities can explain the motivational underpinnings of a variety of human inclinations and behaviors, such as a tendency toward cooperation, altruism, or fairness. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

作为内生偏好的利他行为及其经济学意义

现代经济学与现代生物学对人性的看法相当一致,都把自利看作人类行为的基本前提。但来自桑塔费学派的最新研究证明,在人类进化的早期阶段,利他行为作为社会规范内部化的产物,在维持个人之间的合作劳动、有效提高族群生存竞争能力方面,具有不可替代的重要作用。我们在ESS(即“进化稳定策略”)基础上提出一个演化均衡模型,进一步解释了利他行为的进化优势以及合作剩余导致利他偏好内生的机制。     

Multilateral Organisations and the Limits to International Energy Cooperation

Surging world energy prices, increasing oil market volatility and a nascent ‘energy transition’ are posing major challenges for global energy governance. In response, there has been a proliferation in the number of multilateral bodies addressing energy issues in recent years, and a wide range of organisations now claim a role in facilitating intergovernmental energy cooperation. However, the practical achievements of these organisations have been very poor, with all suffering difficulties that have limited their ability to promote shared energy interests between states. This article examines the dynamics of multilateral energy organisations, arguing that the political economy features of energy – securitisation and attendant patterns of economic nationalism – explain why they have failed to develop more robust cooperative mechanisms. Ten global-level organisations are evaluated and found to suffer from membership, design or commitment issues that limit their effectiveness in global energy governance. These challenges are linked to the securitisation of energy, which has led governments to favour low-cost soft-law approaches over potentially more effective hard-law institutional designs. Moreover, the securitisation of energy poses limits for how far multilateral energy cooperation can proceed and means that contemporary efforts to strengthen these organisations are unlikely to succeed in coming years.     

Survival of the Most Foolish of Fools: The Limits of Evolutionary Selection Theory

The paper investigates whether evolutionary selection, in nature or the market, ensures the survival of rational agents. It argues that once rationality appears, evolutionary selection can account for its diffusion—but cannot account for its appearance in the first place. This issue differs from the investigation of whether history matters. The issue of history or path-dependency focuses on whether evolutionary selection can favor the survival of the potentially most productive apparatus (in the biological or technological sense). To show this, the paper commences with the much-neglected difference between efficiency and productivity. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Altruism,sociology and the history of economic thought

Abstract

This paper is organized in three stages. In the first part, I outline the evolution of the notion of altruism with its critical dimension of political economy by following the intellectual sequence from Auguste Comte to Pierre Bourdieu, through Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. In the second, I consider the forms of transaction to which these sociologists report altruism and its derivatives. In the last section, I examine recent developments on altruism as a result of developments on performativity on the one hand and market design on the other.     

毛泽东与马克思主义中国化的道路

毛泽东对于中国革命以及社会主义改造和建设道路的求索,是马克思主义基本原理与中国革命实践相结合的产物,体现了马克思主义中国化的重要成果。毛泽东对于马克思主义中国化最重要的贡献之一,就是为中国共产党选择了一条马克思主义中国化的正确道路,为中国共产党在新的历史时期坚持马克思主义与中国实际相结合,推进马克思主义中国化的伟大事业提供了宝贵的经验。