MET Seminar - Pawel Dziewulski (Sussex)
| Dates: | 15 October 2025 |
|---|
| Times: | 17:00 - 18:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
|---|
|
Title: On pure altruism
Authors: Pawel Dziewulski & ?ukasz Wo?ny
Abstract: We revisit the notion of pure altruism and propose a general framework for studying altruistic behaviour across a wide range of economic settings. In our approach, an agent (the parent) is represented by a function that maps the preferences of those they interact with (the descendant) into their own preferences. This representation captures how the parent’s objectives adjust in response to the preferences of others, thereby providing a flexible formalisation of altruistic attitudes. Within this framework, we introduce a natural and robust notion of comparative altruism: one parent is said to be more altruistic than another if, for any possible preferences of the descendant, the former’s choices are always (weakly) preferred by the descendant to the latter’s choices. We characterise this ordering and demonstrate its implications in economic applications. In particular, we show that in problems of charitable giving, under minimal assumptions, a more altruistic parent donates more to the descendant.
Contact: sophie.kreutzkamp@manchester.ac.uk
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Williamson_4.08 Seminar Room
Williamson Building
Manchester
