Moral Emotions and Partnership

Actual behaviour is inuenced in important ways by moral emotions,for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Belief-dependant models of social preferences using the framework of psycho-logical games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regardingbehaviour. Our study links recent advances in psychological theory onmoral emotions to belief-dependant models in economics.We nd that { in addition to the positive eect of second-order beliefs andpromises { individuals' disposition to guilt (their proneness to respond inan evaluative way to personal transgressions) is an important determinantof kind behaviour. This applies to private as well as public settings.