Why Envy Outperforms Admiration

Why envy outperforms admiration.

Four studies tested the hypothesis that the emotion of benign envy, but not the emotions of admiration or malicious envy, motivates people to improve themselves. Studies 1 to 3 found that only benign envy was related to the motivation to study more (Study 1) and to actual performance on the Remote Associates Task (which measures intelligence and creativity; Studies 2 and 3). Study 4 found that ...

Envy, Multi Envy, and Revenue Maximization

We study the envy free pricing problem faced by a seller who wishes to maximize revenue by setting prices for bundles of items. Consistent with standard usage [9] [10], we define an allocation/pricing to be envy free if no agent wishes to replace her allocation (and pricing) with those of another agent. If there is an unlimited supply of items and agents are single minded then we show that find...

Admiration is a Source of Indeterminacy

Can consumption externalities be a source of indeterminacy? The answer is negative in conventional wisdom. In this paper we show that consumption externalities establish local indeterminacy if the degree of decreasing impatience is sufficiently large. Dynamic models with indeterminacy are valuable as they tend to explain economic fluctuations without relying on exogenous shocks and question int...

Envy Theory

Neural correlates of admiration and compassion.

In an fMRI experiment, participants were exposed to narratives based on true stories designed to evoke admiration and compassion in 4 distinct categories: admiration for virtue (AV), admiration for skill (AS), compassion for social/psychological pain (CSP), and compassion for physical pain (CPP). The goal was to test hypotheses about recruitment of homeostatic, somatosensory, and consciousness-...