When altruism lowers total welfare

Economics and Philosophy 22 (1):1-18 (2006)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Ethical theories grounded in utilitarianism suggest that social welfare is improved when agents seek to maximize others' welfare in addition to their own (i.e., are altruistic). However, I use a simple game-theoretic model to demonstrate two shortcomings of this argument. First, altruistic preferences can generate coordination problems where none exist for selfish agents. Second, when agents care somewhat about others' utility but weight their own more highly, total social welfare may be lower than with selfish agents even in the absence of coordination problems. (Published Online April 18 2006) Correspondence:c1 105 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6; [email protected]. Footnotes1 I thank Adam Brandenburger and Mara Lederman for helpful comments

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 92,410

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
61 (#265,951)

6 months
17 (#153,790)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references