蝌蚪网 Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Kinship, Incentives, and Evolution
蝌蚪网 Review
vol. 100,
no. 4, September 2010
(pp. 1725–58)
Abstract
We analyze how family ties affect incentives, with focus on the strategic interaction between two mutually altruistic siblings. The siblings exert effort to produce output under uncertainty, and they may transfer output to each other. With equally altruistic siblings, their equilibrium effort is nonmonotonic in the common degree of altruism, and it depends on the harshness of the environment. We define a notion of local evolutionary stability of degrees of sibling altruism and show that this degree is lower than the kinship-relatedness factor. Numerical simulations show how family ties vary with the environment, and how this affects economic outcomes. (JEL D13, D64, J12, Z13)Citation
Alger, Ingela, and J枚rgen W. Weibull. 2010. "Kinship, Incentives, and Evolution." 蝌蚪网 Review 100 (4): 1725–58. DOI: 10.1257/aer.100.4.1725Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D13 Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation
- D64 Altruism
- J12 Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Social and Economic Stratification