Recognizing that individualism, or weak family ties, may be favorable to economic development, we ask how family ties interact with climate to determine individual behavior and whether there is reason to believe that the strength of family ties evolves differently in different climates. For this...

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for production of effort, where family ties are defined as a mixture of true and coerced altruism between family members. We model families as pairs of siblings. Each sibling exerts effort in order to obtain output under uncertainty. A...

Does altruism and morality lead to socially better outcomes in strategic interactions than selfishness? We shed some light on this complex and non-trivial issue by examining a few canonical strategic interactions played by egoists, altruists and moralists. By altruists, we mean people who do not...

Accordingto Hamilton’s(1964a, b) rule,a cost lyaction will be undertaken if its fitness cost to the actor falls short of the discounted benefit to the recipient,where the discount factor is Wright’s index of relatedness between the two. We propose a generalization of this rule,and show that...

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for production of effort, where family ties are defined as a mixture of true and coerced altruism between family members. We model families as pairs of siblings. Each sibling exerts effort in order to obtain output under uncertainty. A...

The literature on the evolution of preferences of individuals in strategic interactions is vast and diverse. We organize the discussion around the following question: Supposing that material outcomes drive evolutionary success, under what circumstances does evolution promote , defined as...