Altruism and Career Concerns

Oleg Shchetinin

No 427, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: The paper studies the impact of altruism on Agent’s motivation in the career concerns model. I show that career concerns incentive is lessened by altruism. As a consequence, altruism can decrease effort, though conventional wisdom suggests that effort should always be higher for the more altruistic worker. This means that not only intrinsic motivation can be crowded by extrinsic incentives; crowding effect can go in the opposite direction as well. This emphasizes a new channel of interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The paper also studies the effect of altruism on wage. Interestingly, the model provides an example of winner’s blessing and shows that ambitions can hinder altruistic relationship. The model can be naturally applied to the workplace relationship and to the local public good provision.

Keywords: Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation; Career concerns; Altruism; Crowding-out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 D82 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2010-01-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/21818 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Altruism and Career Concerns (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:0427

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 ().