ED Seminar – Alain Marciano (MRE)

Détails de l'événement :

« Altruism and Strategic Courage. Some Insights in Buchanan’s Samaritan’s Dilemma »

Résumé :

The goal of this paper is to study the consequences of non-reciprocal or unilateral altruism, that is, of altruism between individuals who have different concern for others. By contrast to what the literature usually shows—that unilateral altruists lead egoists to cooperate, that non-reciprocal altruism destroys altruism or that it generates non-desirable exploitation—we show that unilateral altruism does not forcedly lead egoists to cooperate nor it destroys altruism and that, in some situations, it can even be Pareto improving. By analyzing a one-shot Prisoner’s dilemma with other-regarding preferences, we find that unilateral altruism gives birth to a Samaritan’s Dilemma where egoists predate Samaritans by free-riding on their contribution. Perhaps counterintuitively, we also show that in case “exploited” Samaritans experience a higher subjective well-being than in a classical Prisoner’s dilemma. Finally, we derive conditions for the evolutionary stability of both the predators’ and Samaritans’ behavior.

Information about Alain Marciano.