Strategic Behavior of Moralists and Altruists

Abstract

Does altruism and morality lead to socially better outcomes in strategic interactions than selfishness? We shed some light on this complex and non-trivial issue by examining a few canonical strategic interactions played by egoists, altruists and moralists. By altruists, we mean people who do not only care about their own material payoffs but also about those to others, and, by a moralist, we mean someone who cares about own material payoff and also about what would be his or her material payoff if others were to act like himself or herself. It turns out that both altruism and morality may improve or worsen equilibrium outcomes, depending on the nature of the game. Not surprisingly, both altruism and morality improve the outcomes in standard public goods games. In infinitely repeated games, however, both altruism and morality may diminish the prospects of cooperation, and to different degrees. In coordination games, morality can eliminate socially inefficient equilibria while altruism cannot.

Homo moralis goes to the voting booth: coordination and information aggregation

“…Turning now to Homo moralis preferences with a positive degree of morality κ, this conclusion does not necessarily hold, as shown in the following proposition. 3 Proposition 1 (Ex post sincere voting) Suppose that all the voters are Homo moralis with degree of morality κ ∈…”

Ethics, Morality, and Game Theory

“…Sarkisian [8] and Alger and Weibull [9] analyze models of strategic interactions between agents who have moral and altruistic preferences. Sarkisian outlines conditions under which teams of moral or altruistic agents perform better than teams of egoists in a principal-agent setup.…”

Evolution and Heterogeneity of Social Preferences

“…The utility of fully-altruistic and fully-empathetic individuals is u(x, y) = π(y, x). See alsoAlger and Weibull (2017) for a discussion of the strategic behaviors of moralists and altruists.…”