scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessPosted Content

The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories

Ernst Fehr, +1 more
- 01 Jun 2005 - 
- Vol. 1, pp 615-691
TLDR
The authors surveys recent experimental and field evidence on the impact of concerns for fairness, reciprocity and altruism on economic decision-making and reviews some new theoretical attempts to model the observed behavior.
Abstract
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.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

A Within-Subject Analysis of Other-Regarding Preferences

TL;DR: The model seems to capture various behavioral motives in different games but the correlation of these motives is low within subjects, and it is found that within-subject tests can differ markedly from aggregate-level analyses.
Journal ArticleDOI

Reciprocity, culture and human cooperation: previous insights and a new cross-cultural experiment.

TL;DR: The experiments demonstrate that many people are ‘strong reciprocators’ who are willing to cooperate and punish others even if there are no gains from future cooperation or any other reputational gains.
Journal ArticleDOI

Grandparental investment: past, present, and future.

TL;DR: Although grandparents in industrialized societies continue to invest substantial amounts of time and money in their grandchildren, there is a paucity of studies investigating the influence that this investment has on grandchildren in low-risk family contexts, and a more comprehensive theoretical framework of grandparental investment is called for.
Journal ArticleDOI

Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate

TL;DR: It is argued that the wide interpretation of the experimental evidence must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild,” because there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment.
Journal ArticleDOI

A within-subject analysis of other-regarding preferences

TL;DR: This paper assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences (inequality aversion) using a within-subject design using four different games (ultimatum game, dictator game, sequential-move prisoners dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

A theory of fairness, competition and cooperation

TL;DR: This paper showed that if some people care about equity, the puzzles can be resolved and that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selesh types dominate equilibrium behavior in cooperative games.
Journal ArticleDOI

ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition

TL;DR: The authors demonstrate that people are motivated by both their pecuniary payoff and their relative payoff standing, and demonstrate that a simple model, constructed on the premise that people were motivated by either their payoff or their relative standing, organizes a large and seemingly disparate set of laboratory observations as one consistent pattern, which explains observations from games where equity is thought to be a factor, such as ultimatum and dictator, games where reciprocity is played a role and games where competitive behavior is observed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a framework for addressing the question of when transactions should be carried out within a firm and when through the market, by identifying a firm with the assets that its owners control.
Journal ArticleDOI

Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History

TL;DR: In this article, the authors designed an experiment to study trust and reciprocity in an investment setting and found that observed decisions suggest that reciprocity exists as a basic element of human behavior and that this is accounted for in the trust extended to an anonymous counterpart.
Posted Content

Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics

TL;DR: In this article, it is shown that every mutual-max or mutual-min Nash equilibrium is a fairness equilibrium, and that if payoffs are small, fairness equilibria are roughly the set of mutualmax and mutualmin outcomes; if payoff are large, fairness equilibrium are roughly a set of Nash equilibra.
Related Papers (5)