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A partir de la distinction classique entre Eros, Philia et Agape, cet article presente une theorie multidimensionnelle de la reciprocite. Apres avoir decrit les principes caracteristiques de chacune d’entre elles, il montre comment elles interagissent. La these principale de cet article est que seule une approche pluraliste de la reciprocite, du contrat au don, permet d’analyser comment la reciprocite peut etre viable a long terme.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the dynamics that arise in Values-based Organizations when ideal quality deteriorates. On the basis of Hirschman's “exit and voice” model, we analyze the mechanism that encourage the best subjects, the ones intrinsically motivated who care most about the mission and ideal quality of the organization, to leave the organization if their voice is ignored. By combining Hirschman's and a “critical mass” model, we show the possible cumulative effects caused by the “exit” of the intrinsically motivated members, which can bring the organization into a deterioration process.

The importance of reciprocity is not new in economics. Contractual market exchanges and long-run interactions are both situations based on self-interested reciprocal behaviour. However, reciprocity is not only a behaviour but also a motive that sometimes appears to be inconsistent with self-interest. This fact produces a tension between those who try to explain reciprocal behaviour within the standard framework and those who aim at enlarging it with the introduction of additional behavioural principles. This special issue collects a selection of papers presented at the International Conference “Reciprocity. Theory and facts” were the two perspectives were compared and discussed. In this Introduction note we provide first a broad view of the role of reciprocity in economics and then a quick introduction to each of the contributions enclosed in this special issue.

We propose a model of social relationships in which relational goods are the results of individual joint efforts and past attitudes toward socialising. We show the effect of individual different inclinations toward social relationships on the dynamic properties of the system either assuming homogeneous or heterogeneous individuals. Particularly, we show the role assumed by the environment and past experience of individuals on the dynamic outcome. We use a triangular finite-different system to investigate these issues. We analyse the conditions for the convergence of the system to a low-socialising trap and we propose a few policy corrections to get out of it.

Why is the share of happy people higher in some countries than in their equally developed neighbors? We conjecture that the apparent contradiction might depend on a country's endowment of relational goods, which we proxy empirically with the extent of cooperativeness. Compiling an index of the importance of the cooperative sector, we test whether higher values of the index associate with more happiness controlling for countries' HDI and other control variables. Checking for endogeneity, we find support for our hypothesis and that support is stronger for more developed countries. This suggests that, indeed, relational goods might help tackle Easterlin's paradox.

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. (Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854)

This paper argues that television viewing produces higher material aspirations, by enhancing both adaptation and positional effects, thus lowering the effect of income on life satisfaction. Using individual data from the World Values Survey we present evidence indicating that the effect of income on both life and financial satisfaction is significantly smaller for heavy television viewers, relative to occasional viewers. This finding is robust to a number of specification checks and alternative interpretations. Overall, the results can be interpreted as providing an additional explanation for the income-happiness paradox: the pervasive and increasing role of television viewing in people’s life, by raising material aspirations, reduces the effect of income on individual happiness.

For over 200 years, economics has not considered children as economic agents, focusing almost exclusively on the world and activities of adults (possibly young, western, and with a disposition to play lotteries). In doing this, economic science has followed faithfully the western civilization that, since ancient Greek, has considered children not citizens or agents. Things are now changing quickly, in many social sciences included economics; we think for at least three reasons: First of all, the growing role played by psychological insights into the building and testing of economic models of both individual and strategic behavior has attracted economists’ attention toward developmental aspects of behavior. Studying the evolution throughout age of choice patterns and pro-social orientation may reveal insights into how social orientations originate, how they are learned, how values and norms are interiorized and become active in shaping behavior and, finally, how all those factors evolve with age and interact with the more general cultural background (Fehr et al. 2008). A second reason for getting interested into the economic behavior of children and adolescents is that they have begun to play an increasingly important role as economic decision makers and consumers in their households (Davis 1976; Browning 1992; McNeal 1992; Dauphin et al. 2010). A third reason refers to the fact the understanding of the development and evolution of pro-social behavior in children, the peculiarities in their responses to

The paper analyses, in a historical perspective, how economists approached human interactions. In particular it is aimed at: (a) showing that in the beginning of economic science some economists, Genovesi and Smith in particular, analysed many dimensions of human interactions, and their account of rational economic behaviour was complex and not only instrumental; (b) analysing, through the works of Pareto and Wicksteed, the main turning point in the history of economics which reduced interactions to the sole instrumental one; (c) highlight some methodological questions and doubts on how contemporary economics approaches interactions.

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

The “classic” Christian tradition of sociality, here referred to as Aristotelian-Thomistic, found a significant expression in economics within the eighteenth-century Neapolitan tradition of Civil Economy. This Civil Economy tradition includes the works Antonio Genovesi and Giacinto Dragonetti, which are examined in detail. It was submerged by other currents of modernity but has reappeared in recent Roman Catholic economic thought, in particular Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate. “Economics as if people mattered”—this catchphrase concisely explicates the ultimate content of the Civil Economy research program that constitutes the most original contribution of Italian economic thought since the eighteenth century.

This paper is based on the intuition of Dragonetti, an old Neapolitan economist, which argues that a society experiences economic and civic development if agents promote values and virtues, more than solely rely on punishments stated by law. We thus study the evolution of cooperative behaviors using a mechanism of endogenous social rewards for cooperation (SRC). These additional (material) rewards depend on the recognition that the society--each agent in the society--gives to cooperative strategies. We formalize it with a cultural evolution model in which the payoff matrix and the population shares coevolve. We find that this endogenous mechanism can produce a large variety of long-run situations (victory of cooperators, of non-cooperators or, finally, their coexistence) depending on the social features. Moreover, we analyze the differences between SRC and exogenous punishment, changes in cooperation costs or changes in repetition of interactions and we disentangle their respective contributions.