Why do parents socialize their children to behave pro-socially? An information-based theory

Fabrizio Adriani and Silvia Sonderegger

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We present a model of intergenerational transmission of pro-social values in which parents have information about relevant characteristics of society that is not directly available to their children. Differently from existing models of cultural transmission of values (such as Bisin and Verdier, 2001, and Tabellini, 2008) we assume that parents are exclusively concerned with their children's material welfare. If parents coordinate their educational choices, a child would look at her system of values to predict the values of her contemporaries, with whom she may interact. A parent may thus choose to instil pro-social values into his child in order to signal to her that others can generally be trusted. This implies that parents may optimally decide to endow their children with values that stand in contrast with maximization of material welfare, even if their children's material welfare is all they care about.

Keywords: Intergenerational Transmission; Signaling; Values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 D82 H41 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-evo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16107/1/MPRA_paper_16107.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Why do parents socialize their children to behave pro-socially? An information-based theory (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:pra:mprapa:16107

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().