社会偏好理论:争议与未来发展

Social Preference Theory:Controversy and Future Development

社会偏好理论是20世纪90年代以来,为解释经济学实验中观察到的非自利行为,通过拓展微观分析的效用最大化框架以包含公平、互惠、利他、差异厌恶等因素而发展出的一个热门研究话题。近年来,行为经济学与心理学、社会学、管理学等学科的交叉研究对已有的理论模型提出了挑战,团队认同、社会文化背景、生理和心理特征等因素对于社会偏好的影响亦被纳入分析框架。与此同时,桑塔费学派的经济学家从族群进化和制度演进的角度,认为长期进化过程中所形成的利他、合作和互惠能够作为一种维系种群生存的制度得以演进和存续,继而成为一种稳定的社会规范。社会偏好理论的进展也在近十年间对劳动经济学、财政学、宏观经济学乃至政治经济学等领域的实证分析产生了重要影响,为解释更广泛的社会互动关系中的合作与互利行为提供了实用的工具,也为经济学家合理干预微观个体的选择与合作、改进政策设计提供了有力的理论依据。

Social preference theory has been developed since the 1990 s to explain people’s non-selfish behavior observed in economic experiments.The theory extends the conventional utility-maximization framework by incorporating people’s other-regarding concerns such as fairness,reciprocity,altruism,and inequality aversion.In recent years,existing social preference models have been challenged by the interdisciplinary research from psychology,sociology,management and other behavioral sciences.The latest literature includes factors such as group identity,heterogeneity in culture and social background,biological and psychological characteristics into the analytical framework.Meanwhile,the Santa Fe institute researchers discuss the prevalent pro-social behavior from an evolutionary biological perspective.Altruism,cooperation and reciprocity,which sustain the survival and development of ethnic groups,are essential for the long-term evolution process,from which social norms emerge and stable institutions become possible.In the past decade,the progress of social preference theory also had significant impacts on empirical studies in labor economics,finance,macroeconomics and political economics.The theory provides practical tools for researchers in these fields to better interpret empirical data,to uncover the underlying behavioral mechanisms,and to improve policy design.