Book contents
PART III - PERSONAL EXCHANGE: THE EXTERNAL ORDER OF SOCIAL EXCHANGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2010
Summary
… we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules [of caring intervention to do visible “good”] of the … small band or troop, or … our families … to the [extended order of cooperation through markets], as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were to always apply the [competitive] rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them.
Hayek (1988, p. 18, emphasis in the original)I charge you not to be one self but rather many selves … the giver who gives in gratitude, and the receiver who receives in pride and recognition.
Gibran (1928, pp. 105–6)One of the most intriguing discoveries of experimental economics is that (1) people commonly behave noncooperatively in small and large group “impersonal” market exchange institutions; (2) many (typically about half in single-play games, depending on payoffs and the game structure) cooperate in “personal” exchange (two-person extensive form games); (3) yet in both economic environments, all interactions are between anonymous persons. In Part III of this book, I summarize some of the most compelling evidence of cooperation in personal exchange – in the field as well as the laboratory – and review some of the test results designed to discriminate among the more prominent predictive hypotheses for modeling this cooperative behavior.
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- Rationality in EconomicsConstructivist and Ecological Forms, pp. 189 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007