 Kantians, selfish and "nice" agents: some implications for normative public policyPaulo Pereira () and José Pontes No 1999/02, Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa Abstract: Public choice theory postulate that agents in a non-market setting are instrumentally rational and selfish. However, this approach creates some problems related to the raison d'etre of the normative public choice research programme. This paper considers interaction in two different environments, of instrumental rational agents and moral agents behaving according to kantian practical reason. The first environment, is a step-level contribution to a pure public good in repeated single-shot prisoners' dilemma (PD) games where agents learn the total contribution after each round. The second is infinitely repeated PID games, where agents are randomly selected from the same group of individuals. An evolutionary analysis shows that kantians, although not playing the games, may have an important influence on the evolutionary stability of the tit-for-tat Nash equilibrium. Keywords: Voluntary donations; ethics; public goods; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ise:isegwp:wp21999 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa Department of Economics, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua do Quelhas 6, 1200-781 LISBON, PORTUGAL. |
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