Morality and Equality from Rationality Alone - A repeated game approach of contractarianism

Alexis Louaas

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper highlights the role that equality and reciprocity play in preserving peace and cooperation among individuals with conflicting interests. Following the contractarian tradition, I model a mutually beneficial interaction as a prisoner's dilemma and using repeated game theory, I show that a mutually beneficial joint venture may be undertaken only if the final distribution of incomes is sufficiently egalitarian. From a pre-moral context, the model allows to derive endogenous bounds on the income of each individual that reproduce Moehler (2018)'s weak universalisation principle. Contrasting with the well-known equity-efficiency trade-off, the model also produces an equity-efficiency complementarity.

Keywords: contractarianism; morality; equity; efficiency; game theory; norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-gth
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