Four Essays on Strategic Behavior, Empathy and Gender Differences in Voluntary Provision of Public Goods and Responsible Consumption

The present work examines the topics of strategic behavior, empathy and gender differences in responsible consumption. In order to analyse such issues, we turned to the rapidly growing field of behaviour economics which represents a merger of a variety of different scientific disciplines (economics and psychology above all) and, as such, gives us a unique opportunity to study a variety of aspects (both economic and not) characterizing the behavior of human beings. In the first chapter we present an overview of the main insights into the concept of empathy as interpreted in a range of disciplines (namely, economics, philosophy-phenomenology, neuroscience, biology, psychology and ethology). Empathy directly connects to the topic of prosocial behaviour which have been widely explored and reported in the literature. However, it is worth noting that the attention of economists on this subject is relatively recent. We can, thus, confidently predict that this topic, as well as behavioural economics in general, are going to contribute significantly over time to general economic theory. In the second chapter we examine how do economists study the role played by empathy in simple strategic games. We analyze a series of strategic and prosocial games that allow us to test whether any correlation between empathy and participants’ behavior exists. In the third chapter we examine how empathy works in an interactive multiperson prisoner’s dilemma game. Moreover, we analyse whether priming (that allows distinguishing between a conventional and a legal socially responsible product), has an impact on participants’ choices. We further explore the possibility that empathy acts as a sort of driver of prosocial behavior. In the fourth chapter we extend the analysis of the repeated multipersonprisoner’s dilemma game that mimics the characteristics of the choice between a conventional and a socially responsible product, in order to explore the existence of any gender differences in the Vote with the Wallet experiment.