James Andreoni and the quest for others in our utility functions

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, James Andreoni has produced a body of work like few others in public economics. Motivated by a personal need to understand the determinants of prosocial behavior, and by offering a rare blend of insights from formal theory, controlled experiments, and field data, Andreoni has succeeded in elucidating the broader relevance of prosocial motives and their far‐reaching economic implications. This article offers an overview of his work on prosociality, highlighting some of his seminal contributions and placing them in a historical context. We argue that James Andreoni has had a unique role in the quest to ensure that others have a place in our utility functions.

Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian: Voluntary contributions and neutrality

“…Although the focus of this paper is upon the implications of the BBV neutrality result and its extensions, we should note, before proceeding, that the publication of BBV inspired a much broader literature on private provision. Some of the theoretical applications of BBV are noted below, whereas Muñoz‐Herrera and Nikiforakis () provide an extensive review of experimental investigations.…”

An introduction to the second special issue commemorating works of James Andreoni, Theodore Bergstrom, Larry Blume, and Hal Varian

“…While Munoz‐Herrera and Nikiforakis (2019) provide an extensive review of experimental investigations arising from the BBV model and the two works of Andreoni (and also other questions concerning voluntary contributions to public good provision) the analysis of Faias et al (2020) focuses on some the theoretical questions arising from BBV. To give you some idea of the importance of BBV's paper, just in Volume 20, Issue 5 we note contributions by Allouch and King (2019), Barbieri and Malueg (2019), and Munoz‐Herrera and Nikiforakis (2019), which all cite BBV and, in this issue, Buchholz and Liu (2020). In JPET alone, in recent years there have been numerous contributions to understanding voluntary contributions to public good provision.…”

Charitable asymmetric bidders

“…For a good understanding on prosocial behavior see Munoz‐Herrera and Nikiforakis (), who provide a thorough overview on the theoretical, lab, and field experimental works of James Andreoni.…”