With the development of behavioral operational management, human behavior such as altruism, fairness and trust has received considerable attention. This paper studies the effect of altruism on retailer’s and manufacturer’s pricing strategy in two classic dual-channel supply chains by presenting Stackelberg game models. The analysis shows that the player’s altruism preference strongly affects th...

In this paper, we consider medium access control of local area networks (LANs) under limitedinformation conditions as befits a distributed system. Rather than assuming “by rule” conformance to a protocol designed to regulate packet-flow rates (e.g., CSMA windowing), we begin with a noncooperative game framework and build a dynamic altruism term into the net utility. The effects of altruism are ...

We present a simple framework that highlights the most fundamental requirement for the evolution of altruism: assortment between individuals carrying the cooperative genotype and the helping behaviours of others with which these individuals interact. We partition the fitness effects on individuals into those due to self and those due to the 'interaction environment', and show that it is the lat...

Views on the evolution of altruism based upon multilevel selection on structured populations pay little attention to the difference between fortuitous and deliberate processes leading to assortative grouping. Altruism may evolve when assortative grouping is fortuitously produced by forces external to the organism. But when it is deliberately produced by the same proximate mechanism that control...

This paper investigates cooperative play in prisoner’s dilemma games by designing an experiment to evaluate the ability of two leading theories of observed cooperation: reputation building and altruism. We analyze both one-shot and finitely repeated games to gauge the importance of these theories. We conclude that neither altruism nor reputation building alone can explain our observations. The ...

Approaches to decision making that are based on individual rationality, whether relying upon classical game-theoretic notions or upon modern distributed artificial intelligence based concepts, are limited in their ability to characterize cooperative social behavior. Altruism, in particular, is a difficult concept to characterize with these approaches. In this paper we contrast categorical altru...

Utility functions embodying nonpaternalistic altruism can be regarded as being generated through social interactions among altruistic individuals. As such, they show an important interdependence. Assuming linear altruism, the paper obtains the following results. First, nonpaternalistic altruism has a tendency to unify utility functions. Second, by linearly extrapolating a given structure of alt...

This paper develops and studies a tough love model of intergenerational altruism. We model tough love by modifying the Barro-Becker standard altruism model in two ways. First, the child’s discount factor is endogenously determined, so that low consumption at young age leads to a higher discount factor later in her life. Second, the parent evaluates the child’s lifetime utility with a constant h...

By incorporating reciprocity in an otherwise standard principalagent model, I investigate the relation between monetary gift-exchange and incentive pay, while allowing for worker heterogeneity. I assume that some, but not all, workers care more for their principal when they are convinced that the principal cares for them. The principal can be egoistic or altruistic. Absent worker heterogeneity,...

Donations, Risk Attitudes and Time Preferences: A Study on Altruism in Primary School Children We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years, how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporal choices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocal altruism that provide a cornerstone to unde...