Gift Equilibrium and the Liberal Distributive Social Contract: A Tentative Synthesis

Jean Mercier Ythier
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Jean Mercier Ythier: University of Paris La Sorbonne

Chapter 4 in The Economics of Reciprocity, Giving and Altruism, 2000, pp 96-112 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This article analyzes gifts of scarce resources motivated by altruistic feelings such as love for one’s children, or compassion for the poor. Such moral sentiments belong to the wide class of phenomena known in economic theory as externalities, that may be defined, negatively, as the relationships between economic agents that exert an influence on the allocation of scarce resources which is not conveyed by market prices. An externality is, in other words, a type of social relationship that exists alongside markets and interacts with their functioning.

Date: 2000
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-62745-5_4

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-62745-5_4

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