Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the idea currently rampant in the mainstream economics literature that it is relative rather than real income that is of most importance for individual well-being and that both evidence on expressed happiness and individual “choices” in...

Purpose – The paper emphasises the general relevance of social norms and social associations for cooperative behaviour in less or non-social economic contexts, focusing in particular on economic laboratory experiments, and to illustrate the underlying psychological driving forces....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the theoretical predictions of the social capital investment model and examine the relationships between different forms of social capital and subjective happiness in Taiwan. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the data from the Survey...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of how far costly transfers of economic benefits to others, often understood in economics as instances of (behavioural) altruism, can be motivated by individual group status concerns, i.e. without the common reference to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the supernatural punishment theory. The theory postulates that religion increases cooperation because religious people fear the retributions that may follow if they do not follow the rules and norms provided by the religion....

Purpose – To demonstrate that person and the philosophy of personalism are more relevant to contemporary economic affairs than individual and the philosophy of individualism. Design/methodology/approach – This paper addresses two tasks. First, it provides a sketch of what it means to...

Purpose – The paper aims to explicate the systematic creation of social and ecological scarcities within an absolutely monetised economy and derives the necessity to change the “rules of the game” for doing business towards sustainability. Therefore, a model of human behaviour is developed...