Team Production and Esteem: A Dual Selves Model with Belief-Dependent Preferences

We propose a dual selves model to integrate affective responses and belief-dependent emotions into game theory. We apply our model to team production and model a worker as being composed of a rational self, who chooses effort, and an emotional self, who expresses esteem. Similar to psychological game theory, utilities depend on beliefs, but only indirectly. More concretely, emotions affect utilities, and the expression of emotions depends on updated beliefs. Modeling affective responses as actions chosen by the emotional self allows us to apply standard game-theoretic solution concepts. The model reveals that with incomplete information about abilities, workers only choose high effort if esteem is expressed based on interpersonal comparisons and if the preference for esteem is a status preference.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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