We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this 'overjustification...

This paper studies the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity - the willingness to reward friendly behavior and the willingness to punish hostile behavior. Firstly, preferences for rewarding as well as preferences for punishing can survive evolution provided individuals interact within...

There is growing evidence on the roles of fairness and social preferences as fundamental human motives, in general, as well as in voting contexts. In contrast, models of political economy are based on selfish-voters who derive utility solely from 'own' payoff. We examine the implications of...

This paper proposes a novel explanation for the context dependency of individual choices in two-player games. Context dependency refers to the well-established phenomenon that a player, when choosing from a given opportunity set created by the other player’s strategy, chooses differently in...

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

We argue that with interdependent utility functions growth can lead to a decline in total welfare of a society if the gains from growth are sufficiently unequally distributed in the presence of negative externalities, i.e., envy.

In standard political economy models, voters are ‘self-interested’ i.e. care only about ‘own’ utility. However, the emerging evidence indicates that voters often have ‘other-regarding preferences’ (ORP), i.e., in deciding among alternative policies voters care about their payoffs...

Consider a situation where person A undertakes a costly action that benefits person B. This behavior seems altruistic. However, if A expects a reward in return from B, then A's action may be motivated by the expected rewards rather than by pure altruism. The question we address in this...

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversion in simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference for efficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important than inequity aversion. We show that these results...

The median voter model (direct democracy) has wide applicability, but it is based on selfish voters i.e. voters who derive utility solely from 'own' payoff. The recent literature has pointed to fairness and concern for others as basic human motives that explain a range of economic phenomena. We...