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Altruism, History of the Concept

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Abstract

This article describes the incorporation from the early 1960s of seemingly unselfish behaviour into economics. Faced with the problem of accounting for such behaviour in a discipline that often relies on the selfishness assumption, some economists used the notion of sympathetic preferences within the self-interest model, whereas others tried instead to supplement that model with an ethically inspired model. It is unclear that in investigating seemingly unselfish behaviour, economists have gained a better understanding of its actual motivations, but in the process they have been led to take more seriously other conceptions of human being than economic man.

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  1. http://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5

    Philippe Fontaine

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  1. Philippe Fontaine
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Fontaine, P. (2018). Altruism, History of the Concept. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2170

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