Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism

Andrew Abel and Mark Warshawsky

Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers from Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research

Abstract: This paper analyzes the joy of giving bequest motive in which the utility obtained from leaving a bequest depends only on the size of the bequest. It exploits the fact that this formulation can be interpreted as a reduced form of an altruistic bequest motive to derive a relation between the value of the altruism parameter and the value of the joy of giving parameter. Using previous discussions of an a priori range of plausible values for the altruism parameter we then derive plausible restrictions on the joy of giving parameter. We demonstrate that this parameter may well be orders of magnitude larger than assumed in the existing literature.

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Related works:
Working Paper: Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism (1987)
Working Paper: Specification of the Joy of Giving: Insights from Altruism
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