Altruism and Charitable Giving in a Fully Replicated Economy

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractIn this paper, an economy is analyzed where one group of agents, the altruists, cares about the well-being of another group of agents, the recipients. It is asked how changes in the size of these groups affect the altruists' charitable giving in the Nash equilibrium. I show that a pure group size effect, i.e., a proportional expansion of both subgroups can lead to less free riding and to a lower degree of underprovision relative to the efficient level of charitable giving.

Density Dependence and Cooperation: Theory and a Test With Bacteria

“…The importance of density dependence in the production of public goods has also been much discussed for humans, in the economics literature. Since Olson (1965), a number of economics studies of public goods dilemmas have noted how cooperative behavior frequently decreases and “free‐rider” behavior increases within larger groups (e.g., Chamberlin 1974; Andreoni 1988; Stonebraker 1993; Gaube 2006; Alencar et al 2008). However, as is often the case with human behavior, even small changes in experimental design or context can have important effects.…”

Altruism, moral hazard, and sharecropping

“…Khalil (2004) argues that there are three rationalistic theories of altruism and three normative theories of altruism. Different theories treat altruism in different ways (see, e.g., Becker 1976;Khalil 2004;Walker 2004), and different studies apply altruism in different environments (see, e.g., Gaube 2006;van der Pol et al 2012). In this paper, we adopt the Kantian theory, which belongs to the normative theory of altruism, and apply it in explaining the existence of sharecropping.…”