Abstract:

Individuals differ in the extent to which they help each other at work. What motivates this helping? People have feelings for those they work with. Do these feelings affect performance on the job and what gives rise to these feelings? A large number of empirical and experimental studies were conducted in the literature relating productivity in groups to the feelings reported by the members of the groups. Empirical and experimental evidence indicates that socialization encourages altruistic behavior which in turn increases productivity in workplace settings such as team production. Rotemberg (1994) showed that endogenous altruism can arise in simultaneous move games exhibiting strategic complementarity. We provide a complete characterization of equilibrium altruism in asymmetric as well symmetric prisoner's dilemma. Our result implies that endogenous altruism is robust with respect to the asymmetries in prisoner's dilemma, which is not recognized in previous literature. Our result provides a theoretic support for certain indices of cooperation appeared in the literature. Furthermore, our result helps to experimentally test the relevance of endogenous altruism within a model for a rich class of real world situations.