Distinguishing True Altruism for Sustainable Development: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Ram Krishna Vinayak and Ajit Kumar ()
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Ram Krishna Vinayak: Rama Devi Women’s University, Department of Statistics
Ajit Kumar: IGNOU, School of Engineering and Technology

A chapter in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Development, 2026, pp 1-16 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Effective implementation of sustainable development policies often stalls at the community level, where success depends on identifying credible local champions. This study proposes and validates a behavioural-classification mechanism—the Altruism–Neutrality–Selfishness (ANS) experiment—that isolates individuals whose intrinsic motives align with long-horizon ecological goals. A four-set, 20-round ANS game was administered to 167 volunteers across Delhi, Jaipur, Meerut and Bijnor. In each round participants chose to (A) donate to a public “society fund,” (N) abstain, or (S) extract resources; Sets 1–2 were played anonymously to reveal private preferences, whereas Sets 3–4 were played with public scrutiny to test reputation-driven costly signalling. We analyzed cumulative choices using a robust cut-off rule based on the sample median plus one median absolute deviation, producing five mutually exclusive classes: Altruist, Pseudo-altruist, Selfish, Indecisive and Fluctuating. Non-parametric Friedman and Kruskal–Wallis tests confirmed statistically significant differences both within classes (card preferences, p

Keywords: Altruism; Pseudo-altruism; Sustainable development; Selfish; Environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-981-95-4017-4_1

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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-95-4017-4_1

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