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The influence of these type of emotions in the agents' behavior is two-fold [7]:
on the
one hand,
they have emotional consequences that affect negatively the agent's prefer-
ence function; and
on the other hand,
they induce the agent to act in ways that increase
the average payoff to other members of the group to whom she belongs.
There are two main trends in guilt literature.
On the one hand,
part of the scholarship
considers guilt a belief-based emotion, what is referred to as
'interpersonal guilt'
.The
fact that an agent's utility is 'belief-based', in the sense of second-order beliefs (
i.e
.
beliefs about other agents' beliefs) is also well-accepted in the literature. The latter
has been explained in two ways.
First,
according to the 'social esteem model', where
agents care about what others think about them, and thus it represents an element in
their utility function (see notably [5]).
Second,
by means of the 'guilt aversion model',
were agents care about what others expect of them; that is, agents feel guilty for “hurting
their partners [...] and for failing to live up to their expectations, [which motivated them
to] alter their behavior [to avoid guilt].”[4] (see also [3] and [9]).
On the other hand,
theories of
'moral guilt'
define guilt as a 'self-conscious' emotion, triggered by the
violation of one's moral standards and internalized (social) norms. In this paper, we
present a model of guilt in this latter sense.
2.1
The Model
We present a game-theoretic analysis of normative guilt and of its influence on strategic
decision making. The intensity of a player's guilt feeling is defined as the difference be-
tween the degree of ideality of the
actual
state and the degree of ideality of the
counter-
factual
state that could have been achieved had the player chosen a different action. The
model assumes a player has two different motivational systems: an endogenous motiva-
tional system determined by the player's desires and an exogenous motivational system
determined by the player's moral values. Moral values, and more generally moral atti-
tudes (ideals, standards, etc.), originate from an agent's capability of discerning what
from his point of view is (morally)
good
from what is (morally)
bad
. If an agent has a
certain moral value, then he thinks that its realization ought to be promoted because it
is
good
in itself. A similar distinction has also been made by philosophers and by social
scientists. For instance, Searle [24] has recently proposed a theory of how an agent may
want something without desiring it and on the problem of reasons for acting based on
moral values and independent from desires. In his theory of morality [17,16], Harsanyi
distinguishes a person's
ethical preferences
from her
personal preferences
and argues
that a moral choice is a choice that is based on ethical preferences.
2.2
Guilt-Dependent Utility
Let us first introduce the notion of normal form game.
Γ =
Definition 1 (Normal
form
game).
A
normal
form
game
is
a
tuple
,{
S
i
}
i
∈
N
,{
U
i
}
i
∈
N
)
,where:
(
N
-
N
is a set of players;
-
S
i
is player i's set of strategies;
= {
1
,...,
n
}
