In: Economics
In Chapter 2 Bowles and Halliday discuss the Preference-Belief-Constraint model of people’s economic behavior. In the light of the model evaluate if the following statement is true or false and explain why. a. A rational individual would not care about the well-being of others
This is false.
The Belief-Preference-Constraint (BPC) model specifically rejects this one point of the rational actor model- that most people are exclusively self-regarding (selfish)- that they care only about their own well-being and maximzie their own pay-off. The BPC model, rather, believes that humans reciprocate. Strong reciprocity is the behavioral predisposition to cooperate conditionally on others’ cooperation and to punish violations of cooperative norms even at a net cost to the punisher. Which means that humans cooperate with each other on the basis of reciprocacity. So, as far as BPC model is concerned, its not true that a rational individual would not care about the well-being of others.