Degree Of Altruism Research Articles

Emergence of cooperation and a fair system optimum in road networks: A game-theoretic and agent-based modelling approach

Cooperation is an emergent social state related to the dynamics and complexity of road traffic and is reinforced through adaptive learning. Game theory and research in behavioural economics provide ample evidence that cooperation can efficiently solve social dilemmas similar to traffic congestion in dynamic settings. Traffic theory, asserts User Equilibrium, is both a stable and equitable, albeit inefficient, network state, which is a behavioural outcome of the selfish uncoordinated decision of drivers. In contrast, the System Optimum is an efficient network state that minimizes the total travel costs but is hard to maintain due to the inherent cost inequalities drivers will incur. In this paper, we describe how the principles of game-theory in a simple 2-player game allow the emergence of a stable system optimum through cooperation. We then investigate what happens in n-player games by applying an agent-based route-choice model. The model shows how reinforced learning and different behavioural specifications regarding agents’ cognition – selfish or cooperative - brings a simple road network from User Equilibrium towards the system optimum while preserving sufficient equity amongst drivers. The results suggest that a sufficient number of route alternations between drivers and a certain degree of altruism allow for a self-organizing formation of a fairness equilibrium that can maintain the network in the system optimum. The implications of future congestion management strategies that can be implemented with information and communication technologies are discussed.

Reputational concerns with altruistic providers

We study a model of reputational concerns when doctors differ in their degree of altruism and they can signal their altruism by their (observable) quality. When reputational concerns are high, following the introduction or enhancement of public reporting, the less altruistic (bad) doctor mimics the more altruistic (good) doctor. Otherwise, either a separating or a semi-separating equilibrium arises: the bad doctor mimics the good doctor with probability less than one. Pay-for-performance incentive schemes are unlikely to induce crowding out, unless some dimensions of quality are unobservable. Under the pooling equilibrium a purchaser can implement the first-best quality by appropriately choosing a simple payment scheme with a fixed price per unit of quality provided. This is not the case under the separating equilibrium. Therefore, policies that enhance public reporting complement pay-for-performance schemes.

Hospital Mergers with Regulated Prices

AbstractWe study the effects of a hospital merger in a spatial competition framework where semi‐altruistic hospitals choose quality and cost‐containment effort. Whereas a merger always leads to higher average cost efficiency, the effect on quality provision depends on the strategic nature of quality competition, which in turn depends on the degree of altruism and the effectiveness of cost‐containment effort. If qualities are strategic complements, then a merger leads to lower quality for all hospitals. If qualities are strategic substitutes, then a merger leads to higher quality for at least one hospital, and might also yield higher average quality provision and increased patient utility.

Uncertain altruism and the provision of long term care

When family assistance is uncertain, benefits cannot be conditioned on family aid. We study the role of private and public LTC insurance in this environment and compare the properties and optimality of the topping up versus opting out public insurance schemes. Under topping up, the required LTC is less than full insurance and should be provided publicly unless private insurance market for dependency is fair. With an opting out scheme, there will be three possible equilibria depending on the children's degree of altruism. These imply: full LTC insurance with no aid from children, less than full insurance just enough to induce aid, and full insurance with aid. Fair private insurance can support only the first equilibrium. Opting out policies are self-targeted and dominate topping up schemes when the degree of children's altruism is sufficiently large. However, when the degree of altruism is small the dominance goes in the opposite direction.

Maybe 'Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother': Uncertain Family Aid and the Design of Social Long Term Care Insurance

We study the role and design of private and public insurance programs when informal care is uncertain. Children's degree of altruism is represented by a parameter which is randomly distributed over some interval. The level of informal care on which dependent elderly can count is therefore random. Social insurance helps parents who receive a low level of care, but it comes at the cost of crowding out informal care. Crowding out occurs both at the intensive and the extensive margins. We consider two types of LTC policies. A topping up (TU ) scheme provides a transfer which is non exclusive and can be supplemented. An opting out (OO) scheme is exclusive and cannot be topped up. TU will involve crowding out both at the intensive and the extensive margins, whereas OO will crowd out solely at the extensive margin. However, OO is not necessarily the dominant policy as it may exacerbate crowding out at the extensive margin. Finally, we show that the distortions of both policies can be mitigated by using an appropriately designed mixed policy.

Dentistry's social contract and the loss of professionalism.

The social contract between society and the dental profession is essential to the ability to provide high quality dental care to patients. The social contract defines the profession and its place in society, giving the profession its legitimacy. Society bestows benefits upon the dental profession in exchange for our ability to alleviate pain and suffering caused by oral disease. This article seeks to explore the nature of this social contract in the provision of oral health care and what may become of the profession should the expectations of either party not be met. Changing beliefs within society and within the profession have led to new concepts of professionalism that focus upon alternative values to what is termed 'nostalgic professionalism'. It is concerning when these new values begin to focus upon financial reward built upon commercial practices, with patients slipping away to be replaced with clients; the dentist-patient relationship lacking in any degree of altruism. This article will argue that breaches in the social contract are not to the benefit of patients or the profession and that whilst specifics of the contract will inevitably change, the nature of this should not.

Is GDP a Relevant Social Welfare Indicator? A Savers-Spenders Theory Approach

The use of GDP as the main index of progress and welfare of a country has been the subject of a long debate amongst economists. Using and extending the saversspenders theory recently popularized by Mankiw (2000, AER), we analyze the theoretical relationships between GDP and the welfare of a society. This analysis is undertaken using several different overlapping generations models which all take into account the great heterogeneity of consumer behavior observed in the data (different labor supply choices, different degrees of altruism and/or different degrees of impatience to consume). The results indicate that GDP (per capita) is often a relevant index and is always a decent social welfare indicator.

Individual differences in banknote processing: the role of altruism

ABSTRACTWe evaluated whether banknotes processing depended on altruism and attitude towards money. In Experiment 1, context effects were examined when participants named banknotes blocked by category or intermixed with pictures from semantic categories. Attitude towards money was assessed by questionnaires and the degree of altruism was evaluated with the dictator game task. In this task, participants received an amount of money and they had to decide whether to donate all, nothing or part of it. A facilitation effect was found in the banknote naming task and this effect increased as the amount of donations decreased. In Experiment 2, we examined whether less altruistic individuals might focus on the relevant information needed to process banknotes in a monetary Stroop task. Only more altruistic individuals showed Stroop effects. These results are interpreted as due to enhanced control while processing relevant information associated to banknotes in less altruistic individuals.

A Stable Approach for Routing Queries in Unstructured P2P Networks

Finding a document or resource in an unstructured peer-to-peer network can be an exceedingly difficult problem. In this paper we propose a query routing approach that accounts for arbitrary overlay topologies, nodes with heterogeneous processing capacity, e.g., reflecting their degree of altruism, and heterogenous class-based likelihoods of query resolution at nodes which may reflect query loads and the manner in which files/resources are distributed across the network. The approach is shown to be stabilize the query load subject to a grade of service constraint, i.e., a guarantee that queries' routes meet pre-specified class-based bounds on their associated a priori probability of query resolution. An explicit characterization of the capacity region for such systems is given and numerically compared to that associated with random walk based searches. Simulation results further show the performance benefits, in terms of mean delay, of the proposed approach. Additional aspects associated with reducing complexity, estimating parameters, and adaptation to class-based query resolution probabilities and traffic loads are studied.

A Model of Smiling as a Costly Signal of Cooperation Opportunities

We develop a theoretical model under which “genuine” or “convincing” smiling is a costly signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust. Prior to a trust interaction involving a decision by a sender to send money to a recipient, the recipient can emit a signal to induce the sender to trust them. The signal takes the form of a smile that may be perceived as more or less convincing, and that can be made more convincing with the investment of greater effort. Individuals differ in their degree of altruism and in their tendency to display reciprocity. The model generates three testable predictions. First, the perceived quality of the recipient’s smile is increasing in the size of the stake. Secondly, the amount sent by the sender is increasing in the perceived quality of the recipient’s smile. Thirdly, the expected gain to senders from sending money to the recipient is increasing in the perceived quality of the recipient’s smile.

Egalitarianism under population change: Age structure does matter

We study the compatibility of the optimal population size concepts produced by different social welfare functions and egalitarianism meant as “equal consumption for all individuals of all generations”. Social welfare functions are parameterized by an altruism parameter generating the Benthamite and Millian criteria as polar cases. The economy considered is in continuous time and is populated by homogeneous cohorts with a given life span. Production functions are linear in labor, (costly) procreation is the unique way to transfer resources forward in time. First, we show that egalitarianism is optimal whatever the degree of altruism in “perpetual youth” model, that is when lifetime span is finite but age structure does not matter: in this case egalitarianism does not discriminate between the social welfare functions considered. Then we show that, when life span is finite but age structure matters, egalitarianism does not arise systematically as an optimal outcome. In particular, in a growing economy, that is when population growth is optimal in the long-run, this egalitarian rule can only hold when the welfare function is Benthamite. When altruism is impure, egalitarianism is impossible in the context of a growing economy. Either in the Benthamite or impure altruism cases, procreation is never optimal for small enough life spans, leading to finite time extinction and maximal consumption for all existing individuals.

Hospital Mergers with Regulated Prices

We study the effects of a hospital merger using a spatial competition framework with semialtruistic hospitals that invest in quality and expend cost-containment effort facing regulated prices. We find that the merging hospitals always reduce quality, whereas non-merging hospitals respond by increasing (reducing) quality if qualities are strategic substitutes (complements). A merger leads to higher average treatment cost efficiency and, if qualities are strategic substitutes, might also increase average quality in the market. If a merger leads to hospital closure, the resulting effect on quality is positive (negative) for all hospitals in the market if qualities are strategic substitutes (complements). Whether qualities are strategic substitutes or complements depends on the degree of altruism, the effectiveness of cost-containment effort, and the degree of cost substitutability between quality and treatment volume.

Optimal contracting with altruism and reciprocity

Motivated by the recent experimental evidence on altruistic behavior, we study a simple principal–agent model where each player cares about other players' utility, and may reciprocate their attitude towards him. We show that, relative to the selfish benchmark, efficiency improves when players are altruistic. Nevertheless, in contrast to what may be expected, an increase in the degree of the agent's altruism as well as a more reciprocal behavior by players has ambiguous effects on efficiency. We also consider the effects of the presence of spiteful players and discuss how monetary transfers between players depend on their degrees of altruism and spitefulness.

Family Expansion and Capital Accumulation of a Dynasty

We consider a unified framework that combines two strands of previous literature on overlapping generations growth models of endogenous fertility and savings: one strand incorporating two-period lived agents with life-cycle utility functions and the other strand incorporating one period lived agents with dynastic utility functions. In this framework, we study the long-run effects of unfunded social security on fertility and savings. We provide complete characterization of optimal path in terms of the life-cycle felicity index and the degree of altruism towards all the future offsprings, exhibiting either monotonicity of the standard growth model, fluctuations of the Easterlin (1987) hypothesis or convergence in finite period.

Altruistic Behavior by Egg-Laying Worker Honeybees

If a honeybee (Apis mellifera) colony loses its queen, worker bees develop their ovaries and produce male offspring [1]. Kin selection theory predicts that the degree of altruism in queenless colonies should be reduced because the relatedness of workers to a hivemate's offspring is less in queenless colonies than it is to the daughters of the queen in queenright colonies [2-4]. To explore this hypothesis, we examined the behavior and physiology of queenless egg-laying workers. Queenless bees engaged in both personal reproduction and the social foraging and defense tasks that benefited their colony. Laying workers also had larger brood-food-producing and wax glands, showing metabolic investments in both colony maintenance and personal reproduction. Whereas in queenright colonies there is a very clear age-based pattern of division of labor between workers, in queenless colonies the degree of individual specialization was much reduced. Queenless colonies functioned as a collective of reproductive and behaviorally generalist bees that cooperatively maintained and defended their nest. This social structure is similar to that observed in a number of primitively social bee species [5]. Laying workers therefore show a mix of selfish personal reproduction and altruistic cooperative behavior, and the queenless state reveals previously unrecognized plasticity in honeybee social organization.

Study to explore the willingness of patients (pts) to undergo biopsy at the time of breast cancer (BC) recurrence.

1102 Background: Physicians (MDs) may not request a biopsy (BX) when metastatic (M1) diagnosis is certain, however, there is increasing awareness of the value of tissue for cancer discovery. In addition, biomarkers can change from initial BC to M1 in 20%, affecting treatment. With ethics approval we investigated under what conditions BC pts would agree to a BX of recurrent cancer, to guide MD practice. Methods: Consenting English speaking pts with M1, or at least 3 months post adjuvant therapy, were asked to complete a survey (at home or with research assistant) about willingness to undergo BX at M1. Demographic and disease information was collected. The BX scenarios increased in inconvenience/discomfort and decreased in direct benefit to pt. Results: Among 204 participants, mean age was 60 (29-92), 71% were caucasian, 73% completed more than high school, 84% lived within 1 hour of the cancer centre. 87 (43%) pts had no relapse (M0) and 116 (57%) had M1 (including 20 [17%] with local relapse only, 21 [18%] de novo M1). 82 (71%) of M1 pts reported having had a BX for M1. When it required only image guidance and minimal discomfort (eg ultrasound guided liver BX), 86% of M1 pts would have a BX to join a trial and 81% would for pure research; 69% and 76% of M0 pts would have a BX to join a trial, or for research only, respectively. The Table shows the responses for the most invasive BX. Conclusions: Two thirds of BC pts would undergo the most invasive/inconvenient BX to join a trial, and half would for pure research. This demonstrates a large degree of altruism in this BC population. Willingness increased as direct benefit increased and the pain/inconvenience decreased. This data suggests MDs should not be hesitant to ask BC pts for a BX at M1. This study was limited to English speaking pts and most were well educated, thus it may not reflect all cultural attitudes toward BX. [Table: see text]

Health insurance, treatment plan, and delegation to altruistic physician

We study delegating a consumer's treatment plan decisions to an altruistic physician. The physician's degree of altruism is his private information. The consumer's illness severity will be learned by the physician, and also will become his private information. Treatments are discrete choices, and can be combined to form treatment plans. We distinguish between two commitment regimes. In the first, the physician can commit to treatment decisions at the time a payment contract is accepted. In the second, the physician cannot commit to treatment decisions at that time, and will wait until he learns about the patient's illness to do so. In the commitment game, the first best is implemented by a single payment contract to all types of altruistic physician. In the noncommitment game, the first best is not achieved. All but the most altruistic physician earn positive profits, and treatment decisions are distorted from the first best.

Quality competition with profit constraints

Firms in markets such as health care and education are often profit constrained due to regulation or their non-profit status, and they are often viewed as being altruistic towards consumers. We use a spatial competition framework to study incentives for cost containment and quality provision by altruistic firms facing profit constraints. If prices are regulated, profit constraints lead to lower cost containment efforts, but higher quality if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic. Under price competition, profit constraints reduce quality and cost containment efforts, but lead to lower prices if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic. Profit constrained firms’ cost containment efforts are below the first-best, while their quality might be too high or too low. If prices are regulated, profit constraints can improve welfare and be a complement or substitute to a higher regulated price, depending on the degree of altruism.

Behavioral Mechanism Design

AbstractThis paper studies the mechanism design problem for the class of Bayesian environments where agents do care for the well‐being of others. For these environments, we fully characterize interim efficient (IE) mechanisms and examine their properties. This set of mechanisms is compelling, since IE mechanisms are the best in the sense that there is no other mechanism which generates unanimous improvement. For public good environments, we show that these mechanisms produce public goods closer to the efficient level of production as the degree of altruism in the preferences increases. For private good environments, we show that altruistic agents trade more often than selfish agents.

Microeconomic Implications of Remittances in an Overlapping Generations Model with Altruism and a Motive to Receive Inheritance

The article develops a framework to examine the interaction between the migrant and the remittance-receiving relative(s) under non-cooperative and cooperative scenarios. The model has an overlapping generations' structure where both parties have altruistic behavioural traits. We derive the relationships between the remittances, consumption, labour supply, savings, and bequests, and compare these variables under the two scenarios. For both scenarios, the remittances have a positive effect on the relative's leisure, consumption, and investment. The effects of the wage and the non-wage income of the relative and the migrant and the interest rate on the equilibrium level of remittances are also qualitatively similar under the two scenarios. However, the parties' degrees of altruism as well as the discount rates have different effects on the equilibrium level and incidence of remittances for the non-cooperative and cooperative interactions. These shed some light on the differences in remittance behaviour observed in empirical studies.