Browsing by Subject "Altruism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Ethnic identity and discrimination among children
(Elsevier BV, 2012-12) Friesen, J.; Arifovic, J.; Wright, S. C.; Ludwig, A.; Giamo, L.; Baray, G.
We engaged over 430 Canadian children in a series of activities designed to reveal their evaluations of three ethnic groups (White, East Asian and South Asian), their identification with these groups, and their behavior towards them in a dictator game. Our experiments took place at the children’s schools during their normal school day, allowing us to evaluate the salience and effects of ethnic identities on economically relevant behavior in an important natural setting. We find that children from the dominant White category have a clear sense of White ethnic identity, and tend to favor White recipients in the dictator game relative to East Asian or South Asian recipients. Minority East Asian children reveal a more complex ethnic identity; they perceive themselves to be equally similar to White and East Asian children. Unlike Whites, East Asian children do not favor recipients from their own East Asian category, nor do they favor recipients with whom they tend to identify. If anything, East Asian children show out-group favoritism.
Open Access
Network dependent altruism and economic growth
(2016-07) Çetin, Sefane
This thesis studies reference dependent agents in a static network where the reference point is the average behaviour in one's neighbourhood. It shows that the economy grows at a constant rate on the balanced growth path while income inequality and the speed of convergence depend on the specific network structure. For particular networks, initial inequalities remain in the long-run. However, it is also possible that depending on the location of agents, a lagged agent may surpass the ones who had higher initial human capital than her and as a result, a society that has too disperse initial distribution may admit an equilibrium in which the wealth distribution converges towards equality in the long-run. In short, in an economy at which the production depends on human capital, income inequalities can be explained by taking the network structure of the economy into account.
Open Access
On non-cooperative genomic privacy
(Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015) Humbert, M.; Ayday, Erman; Hubaux J.-P.; Telenti, A.
Over the last few years, the vast progress in genome sequencing has highly increased the availability of genomic data. Today, individuals can obtain their digital genomic sequences at reasonable prices from many online service providers. Individuals can store their data on personal devices, reveal it on public online databases, or share it with third parties. Yet, it has been shown that genomic data is very privacysensitive and highly correlated between relatives. Therefore, individuals’ decisions about how to manage and secure their genomic data are crucial. People of the same family might have very different opinions about (i) how to protect and (ii) whether or not to reveal their genome. We study this tension by using a game-theoretic approach. First, we model the interplay between two purely-selfish family members. We also analyze how the game evolves when relatives behave altruistically. We define closed-form Nash equilibria in different settings. We then extend the game to N players by means of multi-agent influence diagrams that enable us to efficiently compute Nash equilibria. Our results notably demonstrate that altruism does not always lead to a more efficient outcome in genomic-privacy games. They also show that, if the discrepancy between the genome-sharing benefits that players perceive is too high, they will follow opposite sharing strategies, which has a negative impact on the familial utility. © International Financial Cryptography Association 2015.