This experimental study asks whether generosity decreases emotional distance, a question pertinent to human service quality. Highly vulnerable service recipients may not enforce quality standards. Quality can then be viewed as an act of generosity, a gift from the provider to the recipient. For...

This article provides an overview highlighting some major themes of the recent literature on the role of pro-social motivation in the provision of social services. We focus on the insights obtained from two alternative ways of modelling pro-social motivation; action-oriented and output-oriented...

Die Armutsquote in Deutschland hat ein Rekordhoch erreicht. Die verheerenden Auswirkungen erlebt Cansin Köktürk bei ihrer täglichen Arbeit als Sozialarbeiterin hautnah: In Kitas, in Schulen, in der ambulanten Jugendhilfe, in Notunterkünften und in den Städten, die am stärksten davon...

People behave pro-socially in a wide variety of situations that standard economic theory is unable to explain. Social comparison is one explanation for such pro-social behavior: people contributeif others contribute or cooperate as well....

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departuresfrom pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others’well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type ofbehavior persists when risk comes into...

Seminal models of herd behaviour and informational cascades point out the existence of information negativeexternalities, and propose to destroy information in order to achieve social improvements. Although in the lastyears many features of herd behaviour and informational cascades have been...

In this paper, we propose a decision framework where people are individuallyasked to either actively consent or dissent to some pro-social behavior. We hypothesize thatconfronting individuals with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behaviorcontributes to the formation of...