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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Competition For Trophies Triggers Male Generosity, Xiaofei Sophia Pan, Daniel E. Houser
Competition For Trophies Triggers Male Generosity, Xiaofei Sophia Pan, Daniel E. Houser
Economics Faculty Journal Articles
Background
Cooperation is indispensable in human societies, and much progress has been made towards understanding human pro-social decisions. Formal incentives, such as punishment, are suggested as potential effective approaches despite the fact that punishment can crowd out intrinsic motives for cooperation and detrimentally impact efficiency. At the same time, evolutionary biologists have long recognized that cooperation, especially food sharing, is typically efficiently organized in groups living on wild foods, even absent formal economic incentives. Despite its evident importance, the source of this voluntary compliance remains largely uninformed. Drawing on costly signaling theory, and in light of the widely established competitive …