The economic analysis of law mostly relies on the assumption of self-interested agents. Until the early 1970s, it is little concerned with the issues of rescue and helping. Now, an economic analysis of rescue laws appears with the works of Landes and Posner (1978). We show that the emergence and...

Written by James Buchanan in the early 1970s, “The Samaritan's Dilemma” is a pessimistic essay, marked by his author's negative views about the situation in Western societies at that time. Yet, the situation described in this essay also fits into Buchanan’s approach of cooperation and...

The objective of this paper is to illustrate a potential problem in Samaritan's dilemmas: that Samaritans have a vested interest in encouraging parasitism. In effect, they gain from their altruism. To demonstrate this result, we show that the Nash equilibrium in a Samaritan's dilemma is a Pareto...

In this paper, we analyze the role of ethics and self-interest in Buchanan's explanation for pro-social behaviors. Our main argument is that, to Buchanan, ethics matters and is even necessary to explain pro-social behaviors — narrowly self-interested individuals do not behave pro-socially. We...