Contracting Under Reciprocal Altruism

Oleg Shchetinin

No 421, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: I show that a simple formal model of reciprocal altruism is able to predict human behavior in contracting situations, puzzling when considered within selfishness assumption. For instance, motivation and performance crowding-out are explained by a signaling mechanism in which provision of an extrinsic incentive signals non-generosity of the Principal and decreases Agent’s intrinsic motivation. The model’s equilibrium predicts behavior in the Control Game of Falk and Kosfeld and in a variant of Trust Game by Fehr and Rockenbach. This suggests that reciprocal altruism modeling could be fruitful more generally in applications of contract theory.

Keywords: Reciprocal Altruism; Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation; Contract Theory; Behavioral Economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2009-12-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-evo, nep-gth, nep-neu and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/21529 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Contracting Under Reciprocal Altruism (2009)
Working Paper: Contracting under Reciprocal Altruism (2009)
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:hhs:gunwpe:0421

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().