Self-Interest or Altruism, What Difference?

Abstract

This paper discusses the difficulties involved in relaxing the self-interest assumption as it is traditionally used in conjunction with the assumption of rationality. A formal model of altruistic behavior is developed and employed in the analysis of the problems of burden-sharing among rational allies. It is demonstrated that altruistic behavior among political actors is not, in general, sufficient to remove all areas of contention between the actors although the scope of disagreement is shown to be narrowed by altruistic behavior. Additional applications of the model of non-self-interested behavior are presented and suggested.