We study a growth model with two types of agents who are heterogeneous in their degree of family altruism. We prove that every equilibrium path of consumption, bequests, and capital converges to a unique steady state and study the effect of altruism on the properties of steady-state equilibrium. We show that aggregate income is positively related to both level of altruism and altruism heterogeneity. When altruism heterogeneity is low or moderate, income inequality follows an inverse U-shaped pattern relative to the level of altruism. These observations are consistent with the cross-country Kuznets curve linking different steady-state levels of income to steady-state levels of inequality. When altruism heterogeneity is high, income inequality decreases with the level of altruism. Our results suggest that heterogeneous altruism is a possible mechanism linking economic growth and income inequality.

This article studies whether people want to control what information on their own past pro-social behavior is revealed to others. Participants are assigned a color that depends on their past pro-social behavior. They can spend money to manipulate the probability with which their color is revealed to another participant. The data show that participants are more likely to reveal colors with more favorable informational content. This pattern is not found in a control treatment in which colors are randomly assigned, thus revealing nothing about past pro-social behavior. Regression analysis confirms these findings, also when controlling for past pro-social behavior. These results complement the existing empirical evidence, confirming that people strategically and, therefore, consciously manipulate their social image.

If being asked to give to charity stimulates an emotional response, like empathy, that makes giving difficult to resist, a natural self-control mechanism might be to avoid being asked in the first place. We replicate a result from a field experiment that points to the role of empathy in giving. We conduct an experiment in a large superstore in which we solicit donations to charity and randomly allow shoppers the opportunity to avoid solicitation by using the other door. We find the rate of avoidance by store entrants to be 8.9 %. However, we also find that the avoidance effect disappears in very cold weather, suggesting that avoidance behavior is sensitive to its cost.

This paper provides a close conceptual replication of the study by Di Tella et al. (Am Econ Rev 105: 3416–42, 2015) on self-serving beliefs. The design differs in some aspects from the original study, but maintains its fundamental structure and uses a larger sample size. The main findings of the original study are not replicated. If anything, beliefs seem to be biased in the opposite direction. These results are discussed jointly with two other replication efforts by Ging-Jehli et al. (Games Econ Behav 122–341, 2020) and Ahumada et al. (Well excuse me! replicating and connecting excuse-seeking behaviors, 2022). The main conclusion is that self-serving beliefs about others in strategic settings seem to be quite sensitive and hard to capture.

We perform a meta analysis of gender differences in the standard windfall gains dictator game (DG) by collecting raw data from 53 studies with 117 conditions, giving us 15,016 unique individual observations. We find that women on average give 4 percentage points more than men (Cohen’s $d=0.16$), and that this difference decreases to $3.1\%$ points (Cohen’s $d=0.13$) if we exclude studies where dictators can only give all or nothing. The gender difference is larger if the recipient in the DG is a charity, compared to the standard DG with an anonymous individual as the recipient (a 10.9 versus a $2.3\%$ points gender difference). These effect sizes imply that many individual studies on gender differences are underpowered; the median power in our sample of standard DG studies is only $9\%$ to detect the meta-analytic gender difference at the $5\%$ significance level. Moving forward on this topic, sample sizes should thus be substantially larger than what has been the norm in the past.

We conduct two experiments using a demographically diverse online subject pool to investigate total and extensive price elasticities of giving by age, income, gender, political ideology, and religiosity. A first exploratory experiment finds that religious subjects give more, are more likely to give, and are less sensitive to the price of giving than non-religious subjects. We find no statistically significant differences in price elasticities by age, income, gender, or political ideology. A second pre-registered experiment confirms these findings.

Public sector allocative decisions should reflect, as far as possible, the preferences of those affected by the decisions. Conventional benefit–cost analysis (BCA) will simply aggregate individuals’ private willingness-to-pay (WTP) over all affected individuals to estimate the total benefits of a policy that delivers a public good. Given the nature of a public good, it is not unreasonable to consider that an individual may have altruistic preferences over the consumption of the public good by others. In this paper, we set out the theoretical underpinnings for a new citizen-based WTP, informed by political philosophy. Our model extends the standard social utility model (Bergstrom, 2006) of WTP for a public good when individuals are altruists by incorporating a Veil of Ignorance (VoI; Harsanyi, 1955). Our findings show that our WTP (Citizen) correctly includes altruistic as well as distributional preferences of individuals in society into WTP for use in a BCA. When WTP (Citizen) are aggregated for use in a BCA, equal weight is given to each individual’s preference and the BCA will correctly identify potentially Pareto-improving projects in a consistent manner.

Measuring the social preferences of economic agents using experiments has become common place. This process, while incentive compatible, is costly and time consuming, making it infeasible in many settings. We combine standard altruism and warm glow choice experiments with a battery of candidate survey questions to construct behaviorally validated questionnaires. We use machine learning to create parsimonious 3-question modules that reliably replicate existing results on general altruism and provide an alternative method for collecting warm glow preferences.

We introduce a novel way to elicit individuals’ strength of altruistic motivation in the context of charitable donations, ranging from pure warm glow to pure altruism. Using the giving-type elicitation task of Gangadharan et al. (2018) and assuming that individuals maximise a Cobb–Douglas impure altruism utility function, as is used in Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2017), we can uniquely identify the strength of altruistic motivation for impure altruists, which is typically found to be the largest category of donors. We compare the introduced measure to an alternative survey-based elicitation from Carpenter (2021).

While humans are highly cooperative, they can also behave spitefully. Yet spite remains understudied. Spite can be normatively driven and while previous experiments have found some evidence that cooperation and punishment may spread via social learning, no experiments have considered the social transmission of spiteful behaviour. Here we present an online experiment where, following an opportunity to earn wealth, we asked participants to choose an action towards an anonymous partner across a full spectrum of social behaviour, from spite to altruism. In accordance with cultural evolutionary theory, participants were presented with social information that varied in source and content. Across six conditions, we informed participants that either the majority or the highest earner had chosen to behave spitefully, neutrally or altruistically. We found an overall tendency towards altruism, but at lower levels among those exposed to spite compared with altruism. We found no difference between social information that came from the majority or the highest earner. Exploratory analysis revealed that participants’ earnings negatively correlated with altruistic behaviour. Our results contrast with previous literature that report high rates of spite in experimental samples and a greater propensity for individuals to copy successful individuals over the majority.

In this paper, I will defend a communitarian perspective on the so-called “hinge propositions” (hinges, for short). Accordingly, I will argue that hinges play a normative role, in the sense that, among other things, they govern the mechanisms of social inclusion/exclusion. In particular, I will examine the so-called “religious hinges”; and I will argue that such hinges, being the product of mere indoctrination, are particularly effective in shaping boundaries among communities. Finally, with the help of Peter Munz's theory of altruism, I will attempt to explain why religious hinges play the role they do.

Subjects donate individually (control group) or in pairs (treatment group). Thosein pairs reveal their donation decision to each other. Average donations in thetreatment group are significantly higher than in the control group. Pairedsubjects have the opportunity to revise their donation decision afterdiscussion. Pair members shift toward each others’ initial decisions.Subjects are happier with their decision when their donations are larger, butthose in pairs are less happy, controlling for amount donated. These findingssuggest reluctant altruism due to peer pressure in charitable giving.

When evaluating a charity by itself, people tend to overweight overhead costs inrelation to cost-effectiveness. However, when evaluating charities side by side,they base their donations on cost-effectiveness. I conducted a replication andextension of Caviola et al. (2014; Study 1) using a 3 (HighOverhead/Effectiveness, Low Overhead/Effectiveness, Both) x 2 (Humans, Animals)between-subjects design. I found that the overhead ratio is an easier attributeto evaluate than cost-effectiveness in separate evaluation, and, in jointevaluation, people allocate donations based on cost-effectiveness. This effectwas observed for human charities, and to a lesser extent, for animalcharities.