ABSTRACT
Behavioural economists have investigated the impact of social preferences to explain departures from the standard assumption of self-interest. Some models incorporate sociality by incorporating social preferences as extra elements in people’s utility functions. There is a large behavioural economic literature on sociality which explores experimental evidence showing that people often behave in altruistic and cooperative ways and this is broadly inconsistent with a standard economic assumption of self-interest. As with other behavioural economics topics, theories of sociality and identity connect with insights from social sciences more broadly in differing degrees. Issues of identity will be important – the extent to which the child identifies with the parents will affect the transmission of environmental values across generations. Economists have taken insights from experimental studies to develop economic models of identity. G. A. Akerlof and R. E. Kranton construct a model of identity based on social categories and argue that people’s identities are moulded by sociological factors.
