The unsuspected role of gratuitousness in economics

The most important lesson I can draw [from my intellectual journey] is that human beings have a complex structure of motivations and a greater capacity for solving social dilemmas than rational choice theory claims'. So wrote Elinor Ostrom a few years ago in the American Economic Review on the occasion of her Nobel Prize award. Complex motivations, therefore, which cannot be attributed, even in the economic sphere, to the influence of individual interest alone. This is a fundamental consideration that should lead, among other things, to a profound review of incentive theory. But what are the elements that make up this 'motivational complexity' of which Ostrom speaks? The first is certainly related to our capacity for gratuitousness. From a behavioural point of view, the clues to our propensity to give are numerous and convincing, ranging from the smallest act of kindness to the most heroic gesture. It was 2 January 2007, shortly after midday. Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker, was waiting for the underground at a station near Broadway, New York City. He was standing there with his two daughters, aged four and six. Not far from them on the platform was Cameron Hollopeter, a 20-year-old film student. Suddenly Hollopeter collapses to the ground from the effects of a sudden seizure. Attempting to get up, he staggers, stumbles and ends up on the tracks of the train that, in the meantime, is speeding along. Instinctively, without a second's thought, Autrey decides to go down onto the tracks, reaches the boy and, not having the time to carry him to safety on the platform, presses his body against that of the boy to crush him into a side drainage ditch a few centimetres deep, while the train speeds past them. The two come out unharmed. A few days later, Autrey told the New York Times: 'I don't think I did anything spectacular. I saw someone who needed help and I did what I thought was right'. Mamoudou Gassama was twenty-two years old and was then an illegal immigrant who had arrived in Paris from Mali. On 26 May 2018, he climbed four floors of a building with his bare hands to save a child who was dangling dangerously from a balcony dozens of metres above ground. Gassama received the medal of honour for that gesture and French citizenship. An intervention, also fortunately successful.

Such as that of the three American boys on holiday in Europe who on 21 August 2015 managed, at the risk of their lives, to disarm the Islamist terrorist Ayoub El Khazzani who had planned an attack on the Amsterdam-Paris train on which 554 passengers were travelling. These heroic deeds do not always have a happy ending. David Hyman, a law professor at Georgetown University, has calculated that every year in the United States, about one hundred people die in an attempt to save the lives of strangers. This figure is impressive in itself and highlights how much altruism there is around us. But Hyman's 'accounting' also reveals another result, perhaps the most interesting. These are the so-called 'proven failures to save', i.e. those cases in which someone could have saved the life of a person who was in danger and chose not to do so. Well, the data tell us, although there is no legal obligation to intervene, these cases are extraordinarily rare. Hyman concludes his study by pointing out that 'The results show a richer and more reassuring picture of the average American's behaviour when faced with the circumstances of a rescue (...)

In the real world the choice to risk to save someone else is the rule even if not the law" ("Rescue Without Law: An Empirical Perspective on the Duty to Rescue". Texas Law Review 84, pp. 653-737, 2006). To rescue someone in distress even at the cost of great danger is not a duty under the law, but it is, admittedly, a more frequent behaviour than rational choice theory would suggest. Not all altruistic choices, of course, involve such great risks. On the contrary, most of the time it is a matter of small, imperceptible, almost trivial gestures, often not even seen because they do not take the form of an action but of refraining from an action that, while generating an advantage for us, could harm someone else. Not only lawyers but also economists have for some time now begun to systematically explore the subject of altruistic and gratuitous behaviour. A simple experimental situation is used in this respect: the so-called 'dictator game'. In this game two subjects, the dictator and the recipient interact to share a resource. The dictator receives a certain monetary endowment and has to decide how much of this endowment to send to the receiver. I

The transfer can have any value between zero and the entire endowment. Income-maximising reasoning systematically predicts a zero supply. In fact, real people hardly ever behave this way. The choices, on average, can deviate even significantly from the theoretical prediction. Christoph Engel has collected much of the evidence generated using the dictator game and summarised the results. At one extreme, when the experiments take place under conditions of total anonymity with regard to both the recipient and the experimenters themselves, self-interest is most stressed and only about 30 per cent of the participants donate positive sums. When, on the other hand, the recipient of the allocation is a 'deserving' subject, a non-profit organisation, for example, or a person in need or even just someone who was able to communicate a brief description of himself to the 'dictator', then the amount sent reaches as much as 50 per cent of the total, sometimes even 100 per cent in the case of those in need. Other variations are observed in relation to the age of the participants, their gender, their cultural background, the level of development of their society, to name but a few examples.

Dictatorships are influenced by many different variables, but are nevertheless based on a shared and widespread behavioural principle ("Dictator Games: A Meta Study". Experimental Economics 14(4), pp. 583-610, 2011). This is perhaps the most striking element of the human propensity to give, namely its universality. Every culture at every latitude recognises the value of gratuitousness. In 1993, a group of influential economists, Sam Bowles, Kenneth Arrow and Amartya Sen, were involved by the then President of the MacArthur Foundation, Adele Simmons, in a series of research projects aimed at promoting transdisciplinary research projects in the social sciences. Thus was born the Preferences Network, a research group of economists, anthropologists and psychologists interested in developing models of behaviour whereby people take into account the effects of their actions on themselves, but also on others. The work of anthropologists was particularly valuable in this regard. Dozens of them were involved, each one an expert on a particular population and culture.