A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

Environments with public goods are a wonderful playground for those interested in delicate experimental problems, serious theoretical challenges, and difficult mechanism design issues. A review is made of various public goods experiments. It is found that the public goods environment is a very sensitive one with much that can affect outcomes but are difficult to control. The many factors interact with each other in unknown ways. Nothing is known for sure. Environments with public goods present a serious challenge even to skilled experimentalists and many opportunities for imaginative work.

/pdf/public-goods-a-survey-of-experimental-research-1v4kpfarr9.pdf

Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contribu tions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-w orld settings. We show that the decl ine of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for im perfect conditional cooperation. Many people’s desire to contribute less than oth ers, rather than changing beliefs of what others will contr ibute over time or people’s heterogeneity in preferences makes voluntary cooperation fragile. Universal free riding thus even tually emerges, despite the fact tha t m ost peop le a re not selfis h. (JEL C91, C72, H41, D64)

/pdf/social-preferences-beliefs-and-the-dynamics-of-free-riding-5djmyntr9e.pdf

Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods Experiments

In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists have increasingly turned to evolutionary theory for insights into human psychology and preferences. Unfortunately, the existing genetic evolutionary approaches can explain neither the degree of prosociality (altruism and altruistic punishment) observed in humans, nor the patterns of variation in these behaviors across different behavioral domains and social groups. Ongoing misunderstandings about why certain models work, what they predict, and what the place is of “group selection” in evolutionary theory have hampered the use of insights from biology and anthropology. This paper clarifies some of these issues and proposes an approach to the evolution of prosociality rooted in the interaction between cultural and genetic transmission. I explain how, in contrast to non-cultural species, the details of our evolved cultural learning capacities (e.g., imitative abilities) create the conditions for the cultural evolution of prosociality. By producing multiple behavioral equilibria, including group-beneficial equilibria, cultural evolution endogenously generates a mechanism of equilibrium selection that can favor prosociality. Finally, in the novel social environments left in the wake of these cultural evolutionary processes, natural selection is likely to favor prosocial genes that would not be expected in a purely genetic approach. © 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.

/pdf/cultural-group-selection-coevolutionary-processes-and-large-58y9sva2i2.pdf

Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation

This paper develops an approach to understanding voluntary collective action. A simple model illustrating this approach predicts Pareto optimal provision of a nonexcludable public good in the case of identical actors with perfect information, regardless of the number of actors. In this approach, actors voluntarily subsidize each other's contributions to the provision of a public good. Each actor individually finds it optimal to match other actors' contributions dollar for dollar, and this matching behavior leads to a Pareto optimal outcome from the viewpoint of the group as a whole. The approach developed here differs from two other sets of proposed solutions to the "free-rider" problem. One set of proposed solutions, which may be called "coercion solutions," simply assert that individuals are forced to contribute toward the provision of collective goods, once desired quantities of such goods are known (for example, Mancur Olson; Gary Becker's "theory of collusion;" Theodore Groves and John Ledyard). These solutions, however, beg the question of how the coercion itself is financed, since the policing of collective agreements is itself a public good: noncontributors cannot be excluded from benefiting from the public good resulting from the coercion. Other proposed solutions of the problem of voluntary collective action assume some special property of the public good. Olson's "by-product" solution assumes that the public good can be jointly produced with a private good, and that the private good cannot be produced as cheaply without also producing the public good. George Stigler's "asymmetry" solution, as a second example, assumes that individuals have differing interests regarding the exact form that the public good will take, leading them to contribute so that the good that is provided is optimal from their own individual viewpoints. Both of these solutions implicitly introduce some form of "private-ness" into the public good whose provision they try to explain. This paper avoids limiting assumptions of special characteristics of public goods, and also does not postulate any coercion in the provision of the public good. After a description of the model, some examples of the predicted matching behavior and experimental evidence are briefly discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1816699

Understanding Collective Action: Matching Behavior

The interaction of selfish, rational actors in the provision of a public good is analyzed, in an attempt to explain recent experimental findings as well as real-world cases of voluntary collective action. The model, which allows for more sophisticated behavior than that assumed by the conventional Cournot theory, predicts a higher level of collective action that that theory. The impacts of income effects and of the price elasticity of demand for the public good are given special emphasis.

A Non-Cournot Model of Voluntary Collective Action

A new approach to explaining voluntary collective action, emphasizing strategic interactions of actors in their contributions to the provision of a public good, is tested experimentally. The results support this approach, and tend to reject the conventional, Cournot theory of the provision of public goods. Among the findings are a positive interaction between individual contributions to the provision of a public good, and a U-shaped time trend in combined contributions.

Matching behavior and collective action: Some experimental evidence

Assortative matching, adverse selection, and group lending

Self-enforcing reciprocity norms and intergenerational transfers: theory and evidence

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Joel M. Guttman

Author Tools

Chat about Author