Moral behavior and polarization

Abstract An individual that follows partial Kantian universalization polarizes and overdraws its strategy in order to compensate for those individuals that she thinks do not choose the same strategy as she does. Within a generalized Alger-Weibull approach with heterogenous homo moralis individuals, the present paper is the first to formalize this polarization incentive. We show that the polarization incentive can be drawn back to an implicit and so far unknown ’preference for dominance’. Applying our new insights to a public good game it turns out that total public good provision may be reduced by an increase in the degree of morality.