Agents with other‐regarding preferences in the commons

Abstract

We present a unified approach to study the problem of the commons for agents with other‐regarding preferences. This situation is modeled as a game with vector‐valued utilities. Several types of agents are characterized depending on the importance assigned to the components of their utility functions. We obtain the set of equilibria of the game with two types of agents, pro‐social and pro‐self, and some refinements of this set for conservative agents. The most relevant result is that only a pro‐social agent is required to avoid the tragedy of the commons, regardless of the behavior of the rest of the agents.

When your gain is also my gain. A class of strategic models with other-regarding agents

“…These types of agents were introduced in Monroy et al (2017) where the relationship between the social attitude of the agents and the parameters corresponding to the additive representation of preferences was established.…”

“…We deal with non-cooperative games where the preferences of the agents are incomplete and they can be represented by vector-valued functions. In the literature, the research regarding vector-valued utilities has mainly focused on the case in which the preferences of the agents are represented by weighted additive value functions, as in Keeney and Raiffa (1976), Mármol et al (2017) and Monroy et al (2017). Recently, Rébillé (2019) has axiomatically characterized preferences which can be represented by pseudo-linear utility functions and also by additive separable pseudo-linear utility functions.…”

“…An important issue is to identify the contexts where other-regarding attitudes such as interpersonal altruism, fairness, reciprocity or inequity aversion describe the preferences of the agents and to what extent these other-regarding preferences have relevant economic and social effects. These attitudes are in fact significant to explain the behaviour of individuals when facing social dilemas as the sustaining of common resources (Monroy et al, 2017) or the provision of public goods (Kolstad, 2011). In many of these cases an utilitarian approach, which considers additive value functions, can capture the social nature of agents' preferences.…”

Duopolistic competition with multiple scenarios and different attitudes toward uncertainty

“…For example, social responsible firms take into account not only their profits, but also a share of consumer surplus, and this additional goal may heavily influence the equilibrium outcomes. Related work about multicriteria strategic models is Mármol et al (2017) and Monroy et al (2016).…”

Altruism Around the World. What Can We Learn from International Surveys?

“…Therefore, the results can depend to a great extent both on the survey employed and on the question selected. A precise definition of altruism is therefore first given based on Fehr and Schmidt (2006) and on Monroy et al (2017). Those economics papers that employ a definition of altruism closely linked to ours are subsequently selected from those that employ at least one of the five surveys mentioned above.…”