Altruism in Social Dilemmas — Failure to Catch It in a Parameter

A social dilemma is a situation where everybody has a dominating strategy to maximize his payoff, but if everybody applied this strategy, everybody in the group would fare worse than if nobody applied it. A normative solution for this dilemma assumes a multiattribute utility function with a positively weighted component for the payoff for others which was termed altruism. This model was tested in a series of empirical studies with imaginary scenarios where Subjects were asked to make decisions in various social dilemma situations. Results indicate that subjects are willing to show considerable amounts of altruism but not in accordance with the prescriptions of the normative model. It was concluded that subjects actually do want to make rational decisions but that the normative model is too complicated to be applied by them successfully.