A familiar result in the economic theory of the family is Becker's rotten-kid theorem. This theorem states that altruism by a family member will lead other selfish members to act efficiently from the family viewpoint. The authors extend Becker's one-period model to two periods and show that parental altruism can result in an inefficiency known in other contexts as the Samaritan's dilemma. Implications of this for transfer arrangements within the family and for the Ricardian equivalence theorem are drawn. Copyright 1990, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Volume (Year): 105 (1990) Issue (Month): 1 (February) Pages: 155-65 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Bernheim, B Douglas & Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H, 1985.
"The Strategic Bequest Motive,"
Journal of Political Economy,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 93(6), pages 1045-76, December.
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Bernheim, B Douglas & Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H, 1986.
"The Strategic Bequest Motive,"
Journal of Labor Economics,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 4(3), pages S151-82, July.
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