How to incentive Who? Intra-personal and inter-personal mechanisms

The paper focuses on the working of incentives both in parametric and strategic situations. It challenges some of the basic assumptions of the traditional model of economic agent which is usually assumed as self-interested and consequentialist. Psychological researches have stressed the descriptive limitations of that model and pointed out the relevance of other behavioral principles. Intrinsic motivations, reciprocity and trust being the most prominent among them. The paper analyses two different kinds of incentive mechanisms, namely, intra-personal and inter-personal and presents the results of an experiment that emphasize the empirical relevance of the latter. Besides providing a more descriptively adequate picture of interactive agency, such mechanisms have important normative implications that are discussed in the closing section.