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The fetters of the sib: Weber meets Darwin

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Author Info
Ingela Alger (Carleton University - Department of Economics)
Jörgen Weibull (SSE - Department of Economics - Stockholm School of Economics, Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique - CNRS : UMR7176 - Polytechnique - X)

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Abstract

We analyze how family ties affect incentives, with focus on the strategic interaction between a pair of mutually altruistic siblings. Each sibling exerts effort to produce output under uncertainty and the siblings may transfer output to each other. With equally altruistic siblings, their equilibrium effort is nonmonotonic in the common degree of altruism and depends on the harshness of the environment. We define a notion of local evolutionary robustness of degrees of sibling altruism, and show that this degree is less than one half, the kinship relatedness factor. By way of numerical simulations we show that family ties are weaker in harsher environments.

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Date of creation: Sep 2008
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Related research
Keywords: altruism; family ties; Hamilton's rule; free-riding; evolutionary robustness;

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Cited by:
(explanations, 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.)

  1. Alger, Ingela & Weibull, Jörgen, 2007. "Family ties, incentives and development: a model of coerced altruism," Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 681, Stockholm School of Economics. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Ingela Alger & Jörgen Weibull, 2008. "The fetters of the sib: Weber meets Darwin," Working Papers hal-00354241_v1, HAL. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
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