Embezzlement and Guilt Aversion

Testing guilt aversion

Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. In particular, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. In experimental work, several authors have identified a positive correlation between such second-order donor beliefs and generous behavior, as predicted by the guilt aversion hypothesis. However, the correla...

Measuring nonlinear and heterogeneous guilt aversion ”

Recent experiments suggest that people’s preferences not only depend on their choices but also on their beliefs of other people’s choices and on their beliefs of other people’s beliefs. Guilt aversion is such belief-dependent preference that has received a lot of attention recently. An individual is considered to be guilt averse if he gets a negative utility from failing to live up to the belie...

A note on testing guilt aversion

Dissociating Guilt- and Inequity-Aversion in Cooperation and Norm Compliance.

Triangulating the Neural, Psychological, and Economic Bases of Guilt Aversion

VIDEO ABSTRACT Why do people often choose to cooperate when they can better serve their interests by acting selfishly? One potential mechanism is that the anticipation of guilt can motivate cooperative behavior. We utilize a formal model of this process in conjunction with fMRI to identify brain regions that mediate cooperative behavior while participants decided whether or not to honor a partn...