The Puzzle of Social Preferences

Jordi Brandts and Enrique Fatas ()

No 10/15, ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada.

Abstract: We present a brief overview of the experimental economics literature on social preferences. In numerous experiments, economically incentivized subjects are willing to sacrifice part of their material earnings to compensate the kind behavior of others, or will be willing to reciprocate at a non-negligible cost, or even pay a positive price for punishing the behavior of selfish individuals. All these actions are labeled as social in economics because there is no apparent way to reconcile them with any reasonable form of pure self-interest. We focus on social dilemma games and want to communicate two main messages. First, research in experimental economics has produced abundant evidence that illustrates the social components of people’s preferences. Second, social sanctions of different types play an important role in facilitating cooperative behavior.

Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2010-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-ltv and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ugr.es/~teoriahe/RePEc/gra/wpaper/thepapers10_15.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gra:wpaper:10/15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada. Campus Universitario de Cartuja. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Angel Solano Garcia. ().