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Legalism is a Chinese political philosophy that holds that self-interest underlies human nature and therefore human behavior. [1] It is axiomatic in Legalism that a government can not truly be staffed by upright and trustworthy men of service, because every member of the elite—like any member of society—will pursue their own interests and thus must be employed for their interests. [2]
The tragedy of the commons is an example where self-interest tends to bring an unwanted result. The invisible hand is traditionally understood as a concept in economics, but Robert Nozick argues in Anarchy, State and Utopia that substantively the same concept exists in a number of other areas of academic discourse under different names, notably ...
The term enlightened self-interest has been criticized as a mere ideological or semantic device of neoclassical economic theory to justify this type of behavior. It has been considered at best a variant of self-interest that is unsuitable for the establishment of personal and public relations because - like the definition of self-interest in ...
An example in economic policy, economist Anthony Downs concluded that a high income voter ‘votes for whatever party he believes would provide him with the highest utility income from government action’, [19] using rational choice theory to explain people's income as their justification for their preferred tax rate.
Smith first used the metaphor of an invisible hand in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to describe the unintentional effects of economic self-organization from economic self-interest. [26] Although not the metaphor itself, the idea lying behind the invisible hand belongs to Bernard de Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees (1705).
Opportunism or "opportunistic behaviour" is an important concept in such fields of study as biology, transaction cost economics, game theory, ethics, psychology, sociology and politics. Etymology [ edit ]
The research of social preferences in economics started with lab experiments in 1980, where experimental economists found subjects' behavior deviated systematically from self-interest behavior in economic games such as ultimatum game and dictator game. These experimental findings then inspired various new economic models to characterize agent's ...
Constitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as extending beyond the definition of "the economic analysis of constitutional law" to explain the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the choices and activities of economic and political ...