Abstract
Helping somebody may undermine his incentives to work. What Buchanan identified more than 25 years ago as the Samaritan’s dilemma is basically a time-inconsistency problem. The paper discusses possible solutions of the dilemma such as punishment within an iterated game, reshaping the game in the direction of a dynamic one-shot game and the delegation of the power of decision to an agent. The paper shows that only the latter option works.
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References
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Schmidtchen, D. (2002). To Help or Not to Help: The Samaritan’s Dilemma Revisited. In: Brennan, G., Kliemt, H., Tollison, R.D. (eds) Method and Morals in Constitutional Economics. Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04810-8_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04810-8_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-07551-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-04810-8
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