This paper surveys recent experimental and field evidence on the impact of concerns for fairness, reciprocity and altruism on economic decision making. It also reviews some new theoretical attempts to model the observed behavior.

The selfish life-cycle model or hypothesis is, together with the dynasty or altruism model, the most widely used theoretical model of household behavior in economics, but does this model apply in the case of a country like Japan, which is said to have closer family ties than other countries? In...

We examine the realism of the assumption of self-interested opportunism in agency theory. We place subjects into manager/producer pairs and set parameters so that the producer extracts the highest share of residual earnings from the manager by setting the budget at zero (100% slack) and...

Economics students have been shown to exhibit more selfishness than other students. Because the literature identifies the impact of long-term exposure to economics instruction (e.g., taking a course), it cannot isolate the specific course content responsible; nor can selection, peer effects, or...

This paper considers nonparametric identification and estimation of a generalized Roy model that includes a non-pecuniary component of utility associated with each choice alternative. Previous work has found that, without parametric restrictions or the availability of covariates, all of the...

Why do security analysts issue overly positive recommendations? We propose a novel approach to distinguish strategic motives (e.g., generating small-investor purchases and pleasing management) from nonstrategic motives (genuine overoptimism). We argue that nonstrategic distorters tend to issue...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether reputation element affects the decision relative performance of trust, bonus and incentive contracts using social laboratory experiments. Design/methodology/approach – The study conducts the following lab experiments bonus–incentive...