[I]f a gift-of-life ethic is preferred and policy makers cannot solve the philosophical dispute over emotion in morality, a dispute that divides proponents of altruism and of routine procurement, then policy makers could judge whether the prevailing model of altruism has received a fair and sufficient test. This judgment would flow from an initial endorsement of altruism as a preferred public p...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We fi nd that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and position themselves closer to the center. Whether the social planner prefers more or less horizontal diff ...

Theories of commitment, altruism and reciprocity have all been invoked to explain and describe behavior in public goods and social dilemma situations. Commitment theories have been used to explain behaviors like water conservation and voting. Theories of altruism are applied to explain contributions to charities and intergenerational transfers and bequests. Theories of reciprocity have been inv...

Below I use research in theoretical biology to shed light on the nature and function of supernatural cognition, and suggest some promising new paths of psychological inquiry these new understandings open. By supernatural cognition I mean beliefs, emotions, and practices relative to supernatural beings and powers like Yahweh, The Amida Buddha, Shiva, Jesus Christ, Zeus, grace, mana, soul, num, a...

This study evaluates the extent to which an individual's stated altruistic sentiments can be influenced by context-most importantly, by the age and social proximity of the other person and by the nature of what is being sacrificed. We measure willingness to sacrifice own health for another person's health and willingness to sacrifice own wealth for another person's wealth. To evaluate these sen...

Cooperation is fundamental to human societies and widespread among animals, yet explaining how cooperative relationships persist without one party exploiting another remains a challenge. Although it is well established that altruism can be favoured when recipients are relatives or when they reciprocate, it is increasingly being recognized that many behaviours cannot be explained in these terms....

Cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals is commonly explained by the potential for future reciprocity or by the risk of being punished by group members. However, unconditional altruism is more difficult to explain. We demonstrate that unconditional altruism can evolve as a costly signal of individual quality (i.e. a handicap) as a consequence of reciprocal altruism. This is because ...

Altruism, behavior which reduces the individual fitness of the actor while increasing the fitness 7 of another organism, has attracted much attention from both biologists and economists because it 8 seems to defy the logic of both natural selection and standard preferences. In biology, kin 9 selection (Hamilton 1964) is the best-established explanation of the evolution and maintenance 10 of alt...

Inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism are widely thought to be distinct explanations for how altruism evolves. Here we show that they rely on the same underlying mechanism. We demonstrate this commonality by applying Hamilton's rule, normally associated with inclusive fitness, to two simple models of reciprocal altruism: one, an iterated prisoner's dilemma model with conditional behavior; t...

We propose a structural econometric model that incorporates altruism towards other household members into the willingness to pay for public good. The distinguishes preferences good improvements oneself from members. test three different types of - ‘pure self-interest’, altruism’ and ‘public-good-focused non-pure altruism’. Using French contingent valuation data regarding air quality improvement...